


PURPOSES | 
PAR AD I S E 




WALKER GWYNNE 



I 




Class 
Book. 



Copyright^ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Some Purposes of Paradise 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



"The Gospel in the Church." 

A new Manual of Instructions concerning "all things 
which a Christian ought to know and believe." Not 
meant for the Ideal Sunday School, but for the Actual. 
In Four Grades, each grade fully illustrated. Ready 
in September. 

60th THOUSAND. 

"The Gospel in the Old Testament." 

Bible Lessons for the Christian Year. In Four Grades, 
each grade fully illustrated with Original Pictures. 
Senior, 25 cents. Other Grades, 12 cents. 

215th THOUSAND. 

"The Gospel in the New Testament." 

Also in Four Grades. Primary Grade fully illustrated. 

Senior, 25 cents. Other Grades, 12 cents. 
"This truly very superior work." — Church Bells (Lon- 
don). 

760th THOUSAND. 

"Manual of Christian Doctrine." 

Senior Grade, with Glossary, for Teachers and the oldest 

Scholars, 25 cents. Middle Grade, 15 cents. Junior 

Grade, 10 cents. Primary Grade, 6 cents. 

" A more successful attempt to supply a great need has 

never been made in the American Church." — Churchman 

(New York). 

6th THOUSAND. 

"Confirmation and the Way of Life." 

Twelve Instructions on Holy Baptism, Confirmation and 
Holy Communion, with Appendix containing Ques- 
tions, Readings, Prayers, etc. Paper, 40 cents. Ap- 
pendix alone, 12 cents. 
This manual is intended as a text-book for the younger 
clergy and for lending to older candidates for Confirma- 
tion. The Appendix is for the use of children in classes. 

" Thoroughly useful to young clergymen." — English 
Church Quarterly. 

"Splendid in its scope and definiteness." — Bislwp John- 
son, Los Angeles. 

2d THOUSAND. 

" Five Hundred Stories and Illustrations." 

Adapted to the Christian Year for the use of Catechists, 
Teachers and Preachers. 12mo, cloth, 372 pages, 
with Index, $1.50. 
"One of the best and most doctrinally useful."— 
Guardian (London). 

" Has the unusual merit of being entirely churchly." 
Churchman (New York). 

"We strongly recommend it."— Living Church (Chi- 
cago). 



Some Purposes of Paradise 

ON THE LIFE OF THE SOUL BETWEEN 
DEATH AND RESURRECTION 



BY 



The Rev. WALKER GWYNNE 

RECTOR OF CALVARY CHURCH, SUMMIT, NEW JERSEY 




SECOND EDITION, REVISED 



NEW YORK 

EDWIN S. GORHAM, Publisher 

1908 



11 OX 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS) 
two Copies rteceivj-;- 

JUN 12 1908 
I so FY a. 



Copyright, 1908, by 
WALKER G WYNNE 



LC Con 



tr ol Numb© r 




tmp96 



027657 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



This little book was written with the desire 
and hope of helping to dispel some of the 
obscurity which for many seems to hang- so 
needlessly over the life of the soul between 
death and resurrection. To vast numbers of 
English-speaking Christians everything beyond 
the grave seems purposely hidden by a veil of 
mystery, which it would be almost impious to 
attempt to draw aside. Even totnany devout 
souls the condition of their loved ones is in- 
volved in such an obscure atmosphere that it 
seems hopeless to learn anything definite in 
regard to it. If the fact that "Christ hath 
abolished death, and brought life and immor- 
tality to light through the Gospel " (2 Tim. i. 
10) has not been altogether forgotten, the 
greatness of the light has at least been put in 
the background. 

It has been a great pleasure to the author to 
know that he has accomplished a little for some 
bereaved ones in calling attention to the unsus- 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

pected fulness of the light into which the Gos- 
pel has' indeed brought this part of our life. 
Letters from unknown writers have more than 
repaid him in the comfort which, under God, 
the book has brought to them, and in the grati- 
tude it has brought to him. 

In this new edition it seemed well for the 
sake of completeness to add a chapter on 
" Heaven " as the final goal of all our prepara- 
tion and our hopes. Some prayers, also, have 
been added, and two poems, one of which, 
" Down below, the wild November," is less 
known than it deserves to be. It is by the 
present Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Rev. 
William Alexander, by whose kind permission 
it is now printed, and to whom, as the Rector 
of his boyhood, the author owes many deep 
obligations. 

Walker Gwynne. 

Calvary Rectory, 

Summit, New Jersey. 

Feast of the Annunciation, 1908. 



CONTENTS. 



PACK 

I. Importance of the Question .,,,,, 7 

II. Puritan Treatment of the Question . . , ii 

III. No Second Probation in Paradise , . . . 16 

IV. Paradise a Place of Rest 20 

V. Progressive Development in Paradise , 23 

VI. Increasing Knowledge in Paradise ... 30 

VII. Purification in Paradise 37 

VIII. Any Pain in this Purification? ..... 41 

IX. Life in Paradise Active 47 

X. Life in Paradise Organized 53 

XI. Shall we Pray for those in Paradise? . . 62 

XII. Prayers for the Departed 67 

XIIL Heaven 76 

INDEX 95 



SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 



I. 

IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION. 

There is a country into which there is to- 
day a yearly immigration with which no other 
country in any age has had anything Importance 

T? ,i • , r of the subject. 

to compare. bvery year thirty-five 
millions of people, or one-half the population 
of these United States, enter its ports and crowd 
its fields as new-comers and colonists. Every 
month there are three millions ; every day, while 
we sleep and rise, one hundred thousand. Of 
these, one-third are nominal Christians, two-thirds 
are heathen. These immigrants come from every 
land, every climate, every tongue. They are of 
every age, and station and condition — princes and 
peasants, " young men and maidens, old men and 
children." It is concerning this marvellous coun- 
try that Canon Liddon, contrary to his usual cus- 
tom, prefaces one of his eloquent sermons with the 
following anecdote : " An Indian officer," he wrote, 



8 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

" who had seen in his time a great deal of service, 
and had taken part in more than one of those de- 
cisive struggles by which the British authority was 
at length established in the East Indies, had re- 
turned to end his days in this country, and was 
talking with his friends about the most striking 
experiences of his professional career. They led 
him, by their sympathy and by their questions, to 
travel in memory over a long series of years ; and, 
as he described skirmishes, battles, sieges, personal 
encounters, hair-breadth escapes, outbreaks of mu- 
tiny and suppressions of mutiny, reverses, victories 
— all the swift alternations of anxiety and hope 
which a man must know who is entrusted with 
the responsibility of commanding, and before the 
enemy — their interest in his story, as was natural, 
became keener and more exacting ; and at last 
he paused with the observation, * I expect to see 
something much more remarkable than anything I 
have been describing.' As he was seventy years of 
age, and was understood to have retired from active 
service, his listeners failed to catch his meaning. 
There was a pause, and then he said, in an un- 
dertone, ' I mean in the first five minutes after 
death.' " 

It is plain, then, that this whole subject of the 
life after death, and of that vast country, which 
may be better spoken of as the present rather than 



IMPORTANCE OF THE QUESTION. g 

the "future state" of the great majority of man- 
kind, cannot fail to be of most intense interest to 
every thoughtful mind. Moreover, in view of the 
many things, horribilia dictu, propounded by Pu- 
ritanism and Calvinism, and the many fanatical 
or fanciful things of Spiritualism and Sweden- 
borgianism, it is most necessary that instructed 
Christians should know not merely the limitations 
of their knowledge concerning this subject, but 
also the fulness of that knowledge as revealed in 
Holy Scripture. 

No subject, perhaps, has been productive of more 
heated controversy during the last fifty years than 
this, but on the whole it may be safe increasing 

agreement oa 

to say that no great subject is so near ^ subject. 
to a satisfactory settlement as this. Extreme po- 
sitions have been taken on both sides, but such 
books as Pusey's " Eirenicon " and " What is of 
Faith as to Everlasting Punishment," Luckock's 
" After Death" and "The Intermediate State," 
Dean Plumptre's " Spirits in Prison," and Farrar's 
" Eternal Hope" (to mention only a few English 
books), show how near sober-minded theologians 
are to agreement on all the main issues in- 
volved.* 

* On July 30, 1880, Pusey wrote to Archdeacon Farrar, "If I 
had time I would have rewritten my book, and would have said : 
4 You seem to me to deny nothing which I believe.' You do not 
deny the eternal punishment of souls obstinately [word illegible] 



10 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

Nor is this nearness of approach confined to 
Anglican theologians. The consensus on all chief 
points includes men as widely separated in other 
respects as the late Cardinal Newman and Henry 
Nutcombe Oxenham on the side of Rome, and 
Martensen, Dorner, Miiller, Delitzsch and Stier 
on the side of Lutheran Protestantism. 

and finally impenitent. I believe the eternal punishment of no 
others. God alone knows I should have been glad to begin with 
what we believe in common, and so to say." 



II. 

PURITAN TREATMENT OF THE QUESTION. 

But I do not propose to sketch, even in outline, 
the results of these and kindred studies in eschat- 
ology. The condition of the finally im- Limits of the 

question to be 

penitent, the question of " Conditional discussed. 
Immortality," these and other subjects I cannot 
even touch upon. I propose to confine myself to 
what I believe to be the key of the whole problem 
as it presents itself in a practical way to-day. 
There will always, of course, be difficulties, though 
not insuperable ones, in considering God's final 
punishment of the hopelessly wicked, but this and 
some kindred subjects are speculative rather than 
practical. The class that I propose specially to 
speak of are those who cannot be regarded as 
hardened in sin or wilfully impenitent. It is 
these who have caused the greatest difficulty in 
dealing with questions concerning the future life. 
What has touched the heart and roused the indig- 
nation of this generation has been the unjust and 
arbitrary way in which it has been customary to 
represent God's dealings with that vast body of 



12 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

His creatures who are not hopelessly wicked, and 
who to a large extent have been the victims of 
inherited error or of untoward circumstances. 
Thoughtful men, taught in those principles of 
justice and mercy which are revealed in Christ, 
have naturally turned with horror from those 
views concerning the future life which, most of us 
are not too young to remember, were well-nigh 
universally held by Puritan Protestants. 

There is one thing in which Puritanism has 

always been singularly lacking. In spite of the 

exceptions of Milton and Bunyan, its 

I n c o m p e- * 

in!sm°to P de5 g re ^t writers have been for the most 
part devoid of imagination. And im- 
agination is as necessary as any other faculty to a 
full and well-rounded consideration of any great 
subject of religious thought. Without imagina- 
tion there can be no largeness of intellectual grasp 
proportionate to the greatness of the things to 
be considered. Puritan eschatology was as bald 
and simple as its architecture. Such a work as 
Dante's " Divine Comedy," with its wonderful va- 
riety of character, its " tenderness " and " tears " 
and " hate of wrong," * would have been to Purit- 
anism not merely an abhorrence but an impossibil- 
ity. Puritan eschatology may be described in the 
language of art as " a study in two colours," and 

* Longfellow, Divina Commedia. 



PURITAN TREATMENT OF THE QUESTION. 1 3 

those the blackest and the whitest. There was 
no gradation ; there was neither warmth nor ten- 
derness such as one sees in nature everywhere, in 
the blended softness and brilliancy, smoothness 
and boldness, light and shade of earth and sky 
and sea. The whole thing was as bare and bald 
and decided as a New England country meeting- 
house. There was Heaven and there was Hell, 
and the line between was terribly abrupt and 
sharp. Some souls went at once to one, and 
others went just as promptly to the other, and 
the reason for this sudden and inexorable fixed- 
ness in bad or good, eternal woe or eternal bliss, 
was not made quite evident to human reason. 

The early Puritan divines, in a fit of fanatical 
frenzy with Rome, assumed a position on the sub- 
ject from which, having once adopted puritan de- 
nial of a Mid- 
it, they never had the courage to with- die state. 

draw. In the teeth of the plainest teaching of 
Holy Scripture, they denied the very existence of 
an Intermediate State between this earth and the 
final abode of men. Rome, indeed, distorted the 
truth, but Puritanism simply ignored and denied 
it. Rome made Paradise a place of physical or 
semi-physical torture, "an abbreviated Hell," in- 
stead of a place of spiritual purification. Puritan- 
ism was even less merciful. Puritanism wiped 
Paradise out of existence entirely, and practically 



14 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

condemned without compunction the vast major- 
ity of mankind to an unabbreviated Hell. It is 
almost incredible that Puritanism could in a 
formal way commit itself to such error, and yet 
nothing is more unmistakable than the fact. This 
denial of the Intermediate State was no mere 
ignorant popular prejudice. It was the positive 
teaching of its most learned and trusted leaders. 
The " Westminster Confession of Faith," the great 
charter of English and American Puritanism, de- 
clares that the souls of all men after death " im- 
mediately return to God Who gave them," and 
that " the souls of the righteous, being then made 
perfect in holiness, are received into the highest 
heavens," while "the souls of the wicked are cast 
into hell." And then it adds, " Besides these two 
places for souls separated from their bodies, the 
Scripture acknowledged none" (Chap, xxxii.i). 
Accustomed as we are to the loud boasts of Purit- 
anism as to being guided wholly by Scripture, 
such a bold denial of the distinction between Par- 
adise and Heaven, Hades and the final Hell, 
almost takes away one's breath, until one has 
learnt that this is only one thing out of many in 
which the self-same system was guided, not by 
Scripture at all, but by its own self-will. 

And the practical result of such ignoring of a re- 
vealed truth has, indeed, been very serious. With 



PURITAN TREATMENT OF THE QUESTION. 15 

such implied denial, it has been impossible to jus- 
tify God's dealings with the great mass of man- 
kind. Men have revolted in multitudes 

Serious re- 

from such an arbitrary and cruel Mas- Sjf of t sa?£ 
ter — one who condemns to swift and m * 
eternal destruction millions who seemed never to 
have had a fair chance in this life for knowing 
and loving Him ; one who rewards with instant 
and complete glory those who, to common eyes, 
differed but little, if at all, from the lost. 

The only point on which I wish to dwell in this 
essay is the practical purpose of Paradise, or the 
Intermediate State of the faithful, as a place of 
preparation for the final enjoyment of Heaven. 
It may, perhaps, seem as if there were not much 
ground for such knowledge save in a reverent 
imagination as to what might be ; but we shall 
find, I think, as we advance, that Holy Scripture 
and the Primitive Church are far from silent on 
the subject— are, indeed, far fuller and clearer 
than most of us have ever suspected. 



III. 

NO SECOND PROBATION IN PARADISE. 

And first let me touch on one purpose which 

it is evident, from Holy Scripture and right rea- 

a second son alike, that the Intermediate State 

probation not - T . . 

one of the pur- has not. 1 mean a second probation. 

poses of Para- 
dise. Without quoting particular passages, 

I think it is plain that the Scriptures generally 
teach that this present life is the only probation 
man has. This is not so much declared as implied. 
It is the axiomatic truth which everywhere is 
taken for granted as forming the basis of all ex- 
hortations to repentance and obedience. "Now," 
this present age, is "the day," the only day, "of 
salvation " (2 Cor. vi. 2). If this is not the meaning 
of all such exhortations, then Holy Scripture is 
clearly chargeable with suppressio veri. The gen- 
eral, I might say the universal, teaching of Scrip- 
ture is plainly summed up in the sentence, " It is 
appointed unto men once to die, and after this [not 
the judgment, but] a judgment" (Heb. ix. 27) — 
that is, not the General Judgment, but a particu- 
lar judgment, such as assigns the individual soul 



NO SECOND PROBATION IN PARADISE. If 

to this or that place in the Intermediate State, 
there to await the General Judgment of the Last 
Day. Moreover, the teaching of the whole his- 
toric Church on the subject happily admits of no 
controversy. For even Rome, with all her many 
doctrinal and practical errors concerning the state 
of the departed, is at one on this point with all 
other branches of the Church in knowing no such 
doctrine as that of a second probation. 

But besides all this, leaving Scripture and tradi- 
tion aside, it is hard to find any ground, even in 
reason, for this modern theory of a new Any true 

probation must 

testing of men in a future life. It is be in the body. 
impossible to see how man, in a bodiless state, 
could be said to undergo a probation at all. It is 
of the very essence of probation that it should be 
" in the body." Such a testing as is implied in the 
case of a disembodied soul, cannot be reckoned as 
a testing of the man. At best, it is only a testing 
of depart of the man, his soul alone, and we are ex- 
pressly told that final judgment has to do with 
"the things done in the body" (2 Cor. v. 10). 
The change that takes place at death, the rending 
asunder of body and soul, alters all the conditions 
of probation. Fallen angels, indeed, might con- 
ceivably have a second probation, but not disem- 
bodied men. At least, if man is ever to have a 
second probation it must be after his resurrection, 



1 8 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

not before, a probation " in the body." But of such 
a theory, even the wildest visionary has never, 
we believe, suggested the possibility. 

That there are indeed difficulties in thus limit- 
ing probation to the life on earth, is evident. But 
Difficulties they are only difficulties to those who 

explained by 

the recognition deny or ignore the Intermediate State 

of the Interme- * ° 

diate state. Q f the soul between death and resur- 
rection, and the purposes which that state is meant 
to accomplish. What those purposes are, espe- 
cially for those who are " ignorant and out of the 
way," we shall endeavour to see presently, but pro- 
bation is not one of them. This present world, 
even under the most unfavourable circumstances, 
may be accounted sufficient for that.* 

But if a second probation is not the purpose of 

the Intermediate State, where the soul awaits re- 

if no second union with the body, what, let us ask, 

probation why . 

this long deten- ts its purpose ? In my answer to this 

tion in Para- i x 

dlse? question I intentionally confine myself, 

as I have already said, to one portion of that 
State, namely the abode of those of whom it cannot 
be said that they are lost. That there is some 
great purpose will not by any thoughtful person 
be for a moment questioned. The average num- 

* I am glad to call attention here to an admirable discussion of 
this, and some related questions, by my friend, the Rev. Cameron 
Mann, D.D., in a series of sermons entitled Future Punishment. 



NO SECOND PROBATION IN PARADISE. 



19 



ber of years spent by each generation of men on 
this earth is but thirty-three, the years of our 
Lord's typical life. In Paradise, on the other 
hand, the vast majority of souls have already 
spent not years, but centuries, and Heaven, 
with its " final consummation of bliss in body 
and soul," is not yet attained. Surely there 
must be some wide-reaching and very practical 
intention in this long delay. Why is it that God 
does not admit men immediately at death to 
their final home ? What are the uses and pur- 
poses of this continued detention of the soul in 
its progress upward to the Beatific Vision, and 
the final goal of good ? Surely it is a question 
worth considering, a question that challenges 
our reverent examination and demands our 
patient thought. 



IV. 

PARADISE A PLACE OF REST. 

One answer that comes to us, not only from the 

Holy Scriptures, but everywhere from the most 

Paradise a ancient liturgies and the inscriptions 

place of rest. Qn the earliest Christian tombs, is that 

Paradise is pre-eminently a place of rest. There 
the wearied warriors of Christ " rest from their 
labours " (Rev. xiv. 13). Again, they are said to 
" rest for a little season " (vi. 11). In the early 
monuments we have this thought recurring con- 
stantly. The faithful departed " rest in peace," 
and the increase of light and refreshment is asked 
for them in the abodes of rest. It was a fitting 
word for such an age, when the mere profession 
of the Christian name was fraught with danger, 
and the Church seemed to outward eyes but a 
frail and tiny bark in the midst of a vast, storm- 
tossed and angry sea. No wonder that rest was 
the predominant thought — it could not well be 
otherwise. The very word Paradise, the word 
which our Lord Himself on the cross had em- 
ployed to describe that place of disembodied 



PARADISE A PLACE OF REST. 2 1 

souls, must also have been constantly suggestive 
of this thought of rest. Paradise was simply 
the word in common use throughout the East, 
among Persians and Greeks as well as Hebrews, 
for a royal park.* It was not the king's palace, 
but the royal garden surrounding the palace, 
with its cool delights and shady walks; not 
Heaven, but the ante-chamber of Heaven, where 
souls might pause a while before the King came 
out to bring them in to His secret presence- 
chamber, His supreme delights. 

And rest is naturally the first thought that 
comes to us all. There is so much of sorrow, of 
weariness and of painfulness in this life, even at 
its best, that the predominant idea of the new life 
must necessarily be a negative one. The depart- 
ing saint is like a tired child, falling asleep and 
forgetting in its deep slumber the sobbing and the 
sorrows that have troubled its brief day. He is 
like a weary toiler of the world retiring at the 
evening hour to his home, and " resting from his 

* The word is Paredds in Hebrew, and Paradeisos in Greek. 
Readers of Xenophon will remember how often it is used to de- 
scribe those magnificent Persian parks, each with its royal palace 
and its groves and streams and fruits, which the army passed on its 
march. In the Old Testament the word occurs three times: Neh. 
ii. 8; Ecc. ii. 5; Song of Solomon iv. 13; though variously 
translated as "forest" and "orchard." In the New Testament 
it also occurs three times: S. Luke xxiii. 43; 2 Cor. xii. 4; Rev. 
ii. 7- 



22 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

labours." In fact the most touching of all the re- 
vealed descriptions of the blessed dead, even in 
m ; , their final state, is that which is wholly 

The first J 

futofnfe^a represented in this negative way. It 
tells rather of the withdrawal of wea- 
riness, than of the approach of positive joy. It 
is throughout a list of negations. " God shall 
wipe away (it says) all tears from their eyes, and 
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor 
crying, neither shall there be any more pain ; for 
the former things are passed away" (Rev. xxi.4). 
And this negative thought seemed to be enough 
to satisfy the earliest believers. They lived in the 
constant expectation of Christ's speedy coming, 
and Paradise was a sure resting-place, though 
but for a "little season" (Rev. vi. 11). They 
seemed to hear the voice of their Divine Master 
calling them thither as once He called His 
Apostles, when He said, " Come ye yourselves 
apart and rest awhile" (S. Mark vi. 31). 



V. 

PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT IN PARADISE. 

But as time went on, as time has gone on with 
us, and centuries have taken the place of years, it 
is evident that this " Sabbath-rest to 
the people of God " (Heb. iv.o) could Sf^&Jg 
not have been the full purpose of Para- quate * 
dise even for the first Christians. They must 
have seen, though with the advance of time we 
doubtless are able to see more plainly, that there 
were other uses besides rest for that holy place 
in the intention of the love of God.* A fuller 
answer to the question concerning the purposes 
of Paradise might be summed up in one word — 
not probation, but preparation; not the total 
alteration of character, but the development of 
character. 

* " Nor is it at all incredible that a book which has been so 
long in the possession of mankind should contain many truths as 
yet undiscovered. . . . And possibly it might be intended 
that events, as they come to pass, should open and ascertain the 
meaning of several parts of Scripture." (Bishop Butler, Anal- 
ogy, Part II., Chap, iii.) 



24 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

And here, at the outset of our examination into 

the particular purposes of Paradise, let me make 

the general remark that there is no reasonable 

ground for supposing that the law of progressive 

development is confined to any one 

Progress lve r J 

not e con P fined I to P art of God's universe, invisible or 
visible, angelic or human. " Our per- 
fection for eternity," writes Archer Butler, " may 
be progress for eternity ! Such at this hour may 
be the perfection of the angels. And the whole 
universe of pure-born and regenerate beings may 
be conceived as scattered at different points 
along one vast highway leading to the light in- 
accessible where God dwells alone, in the secret 
sanctuary of His own infinite attributes; all 
travel incessantly towards the light, which glows 
brighter and brighter on them as they advance 
— for the progress is their happiness." * 

To take but one point: it is surely a mistake to 

suppose that the idea of time is confined to this 

The idea of world. I cannot see how the thought 

time beyond . c . 

this world. of time can be separated from any mute 
being, be he angel or glorified man. Eternity 
must be, for every created being, simply unend- 
ing or eternal time. It is true the method of 
measurement will be very different under such 
different conditions, but for finite beings time 

* Sermons, Second Series, p. 99. 



PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT IN PARADISE. 2 $ 

there must be. Newman has beautifully, and 
with an exact philosophy, stated this truth in his 
" Dream of Gerontius." The guardian angel is 
addressing the disembodied soul of Gerontius : 

Spirits and men by different standards mete 
The less and greater in the flow of time. 
By sim and moon, primeval ordinances, 
By stars which rise and set harmoniously, 
By the recurring seasons, and the swing, 
This way and that, of the suspended rod, 
Precise and punctual, men divide the hours, 
Equal, continuous, for their common use. 
Not so with us in the immaterial world; 
But intervals in their succession 
Are measured by the living thought alone, 
And grow and wane with its intensity. 

The method, indeed, is different, but time re- 
mains. " How long, O Lord? "is the "loud cry" 
of the martyr " souls," even in their blessedness 
in Paradise (Rev. vi. 10). To the infinite mind of 
God alone, the eternal " I am," all time is ever 
present. But with the finite mind this cannot 
be. It is of its very nature that there must be 
succession, and succession of whatever kind im- 
plies time. 

But there is more even than this implied by the 
fact of man's finite nature continuing after what 
we call death. Progressive development of char- 



2 6 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

acter is a logical necessity which there is no es- 
caping. We all acknowledge this as true up to 
continued tne point of death. But why stop 

chlracteTaftCT there ? What reason is there in the 
death a neces- 
sity- nature of things for stopping there ? 

None whatever, unless man at the moment of 

decease becomes an infinite being. 

Or is there any reason for it in Scripture ? On 

the contrary, the point of death is rarely ever re- 

Not death, f erre d to by our Lord or His Apostles. 

recti e onfthe The great boundary line of man's life 

prominent , 

thought in our is always a point away beyond death, 
mg * namely, the Resurrection and the 

Final Judgment. All life here on earth, and in 
the bodiless condition in Paradise, is regarded 
for Christians as one unbroken ascending plane, 
one connected whole. Death is not mentioned 
even once in our Lord's great discourse concern- 
ing " the last things " (S. Matt. xxiv. xxv.). The 
climax in the parable of the Ten Virgins is the 
coming of the Bridegroom ; in that of the Tal- 
ents it is the return of the lord ; in that of the 
Pounds, the return of the nobleman (S. Luke xix. 
15). So, too, in the Marriage Feast it is the en- 
trance of the king ; in the Wheatfield it is the 
harvest home (S. Matt. xx. 11; xiii. 40, 41); 
all signifying, not death, but " the end of the 
world " and the Final Judgment. The pattern 



PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT IN PARADISE. 27 

of our Lord's language when speaking of re- 
wards is always, " Thou shalt be recompensed 
[not at death but] at the resurrection of the just " 
(S. Luke xiv. 14). 

The same fact is observable in the teaching of 
His Apostles. The death-line seems to have van- 
ished. S. Paul looks forward for his 

The same 

"crown of righteousness," not to his Sching f ofthe 
"departure," but to "that day" of Apostles * 
" the righteous Judge " (2 Tim. iv. 8). His prayer 
for his flock in Thessalonica is that their "whole 
spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless 
[not merely till death but] unto the coming of 
our Lordfesus Christ " (1 Thess. v. 23 ; cf 1 Cor. 
i. 8). His prayer for Onesiphorus (whether alive 
or dead at the time matters not) is that " he may 
find mercy of the Lord [not at death but] in that 
day" meaning the Last Day (2 Tim. i. 18). His 
confident hope for his spiritual children in Phi- 
lippi is that " He which hath begun a good work 
in [them] will perform it [not merely until their 
departure out of this world but] until the day of 
Jesus Christ " (Phil. i. 6). The death of the body 
is indeed rarely mentioned in the New Testa- 
ment, and in no place is it represented either as 
the end or the beginning of life. To all Thedeath of 
it is but a stage in life's journey, and ^stagem & 
not the attainment of its goal. To the 



28 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

Christian it is but the striking of a tent (2 Cor. v. 
1), the " unloosing " of sails and rudder-bands, as 
S. Paul twice calls it (Phil. i. 23 ; 2 Tim. iv. 6). It is 
merely the preparation for another and a sunnier 
stretch of sea, but one whose true haven is not 
reached until the Resurrection and the Judg- 
ment* It is said even of the elder saints who 
" died in faith, not having received the promises," 
that " they now\ [namely, in Paradise] desire a 
better country, that is, an heavenly . . . for 
[God] hath prepared for them a city" (Heb. xi. 
13, 16). And it is this same "desire" that is 
heard by S. John on the lips even of the Christian 
martyrs, whose " souls " he saw in the highest 
" mansion " of Paradise, " under the altar " (Rev. 
vi. 9, 10, 1 1) ; a desire for final judgment, and all 



* That S. Paul does not stand alone in this, see S. James v. 7; 
1 Pet. i. 5, 7, 13; v. 4; 2 Pet. iii. 12; 1 John ii. 28; iii. 2; iv. 
17; Rev. iii. 11. The explanation that would confine this lan- 
guage of expectation to the Christians then living, though this was 
doubtless its primary purpose, is seen at a moment's thought to be 
insufficient and erroneous. Paradise and its inhabitants were 
never absent from the Apostles' thought. See 1 Cor. xv. 18, 51; 
1 Thess. iv. 13, 14, 15, where the thought is expressed. So, too, 
S. John in Revelation passim. 

f The Greek here is vvv, and it is evident from the context that 
the word is used purely as denoting time, this present time in con- 
trast with that when the patriarchs were still on earth. The in- 
ferential use of "now" (which is very rare in the New Testament 
— see Thayer's Grimm's Wilke's Lexicon of the New Testament) 
seems to be impossible in this particular case. 



PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT IN PARADISE. 29 

which that implies, in their "perfect consum- 
mation and bliss, both in body and soul," at the 
Resurrection* 

* Compare S. Peter's special mention of "the patriarch David" 
as not yet "ascended into the heavens" (Acts ii. 29, 34). Surely 
these cases of David and the Christian martyrs alone afford pal- 
mary proof of the error of the Roman view, which would abridge 
the preparatory discipline of Paradise for the majority, and would 
abolish it altogether for a few exceptionally saintly souls. Script- 
ure nowhere gives us the slightest hint that the life in Paradise 
will cease for anyone until the Resurrection. Any assumption to 
the contrary destroys in fact the analogy with our Lord's perfect 
life, Whose ascension into Heaven did not take place until after 
His resurrection (S. John xx. 17). 



VI. 

INCREASING KNOWLEDGE IN PARADISE. 

Let us now ask in what particular ways this 
progress in spiritual life and character may be 
carried on after death ? Holy Scripture, while 
clearly affirming the fact, does not enter into any 
details as to the method. It is evident, however, 
that there are two great lines along which such 
development must be effected, namely, the in- 
crease of knowledge and the increase of holiness. 

And first as to knowledge. Though it is the 

almost universal popular belief of our day, yet 

Gradual in- surely it is an utterly mistaken one, that 

knowledge one immediately at death the soul is filled 

chief purpose J 

of Paradise. with all but boundless knowledge. S. 
Paul indeed speaks of a time when we shall no 
longer see " through a glass darkly, but face to 
face " (i Cor. xiii. 12). It is plain, however, that 
he cannot be speaking of the moment of death, 
for he is describing the time when " that which is 
perfect is come " (verse 10), a time which, as we 
have seen, is always connected, not with Paradise 
and death, but with Heaven and the resurrection 



INCREASING KNOWLEDGE IN PARADISE. 31 

(Cf. Heb. xi. 40). It is true that the folly or in- 
completeness of much previous fancied knowl- 
edge will be at once apparent in Paradise, just 
as the actual sight of countries and men of whom 
one has only read or heard, corrects earlier im- 
pressions. Of course, things wonderful beyond 
utterance * will there be unfolded to the mind 
with a new and strange vividness. Of course, 
spiritual things will acquire there a reality which 
they never possessed for us before. Faith in 
many points (not all) will be changed to sight, 
and the relative value of the temporal and the 
eternal will be evident there beyond a shadow of 
doubt. Hope, also, though still lacking in the 
attainment of that which can alone satisfy it, 
namely the Resurrection (Acts xxiii. 6), will there 
receive wonderful encouragement and help. 

But surely it is a mistake to suppose that the 
mere entrance into the new land, the opening of 
the spirit's eyes directly on spiritual Knowledge 

not instantane- 

objects, necessarily implies complete ous - 
and instantaneous knowledge. That, certainly, 
never has been God's method with us here on 
earth. Why, then, should we suppose that all the 
laws of life and mind should there be reversed? 
We are distinctly told that some spirits in Para- 
dise were dependent for knowledge on Christ's 
* "Unspeakable" (2 Cor. x. 4). 



32 



SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 



own coming and " preaching " to them at His 
death (i Pet. iii. 19). Before this, also, Moses and 
Elijah had been recalled from thence by our Lord 
to be instructed from His own lips on the Mount 
of Transfiguration (S. Luke ix. 30, 31). While 
even the angels, though in the higher sphere of 
Heaven itself, still ''desire to look into" those 
mysteries which are only revealed to and " by 
the Church" (1 Peter i. 12 ; Eph. iii. 10). The 
capacity of the soul, freed from the trammels of 
a sinful body, is doubtless vastly increased. But 
let us remember that increased capacity does not 
imply instant and complete use of that capacity. 
Knowledge must still be a thing of gradual ac- 
quisition, a joyful work indeed, but still a work, 
and a gradual one. 

And if there is vast opportunity in Paradise for 

the increase of knowledge on the part of those 

Paradise a who in this life had already learned the 

school for those _ _ _ . in r 

brought up in truth of God, what shall we say of 

unwilling igno- 
rance, those who had no such opportunity 

here ? How does it not justify the ways of God 
with men to remember that, if He makes (as He 
does) the loving knowledge of Himself and of 
His Son necessary to the attainment of everlast- 
ing salvation in Heaven (S. John xvii. 3), then 
those countless souls in all lands, to whom the 
Gospel never sounded forth on earth, or sounded 



INCREASING KNOWLEDGE IN PARADISE. 



33 



only with deep imperfection and uncertainty, will 
have in Paradise an opportunity that was denied 
them here? For whatever narrow views have held 
sway here and there, it is very certain that neither 
Holy Scripture nor the historic Church as a 
whole, has anywhere pronounced a soul beyond 
God's love, whose only fault was unwilling igno- 
rance ; nor has either Scripture or the Church 
drawn the line where ignorance can be declared 
to be willing. " The Church," it has been beauti- 
fully said, " has its long list of saints ; it has 
not inserted one name in any catalogue of the 
damned." And many, wrote an ancient Father, 
are of the soul of the Church, who are not now of 
its body.* We may well believe, nay, we must 
believe, that the Lord Jesus will find many be- 
ginnings of real faith in Himself and real repent- 
ance toward God, even in those whose only light 
has been that "which lighteth every man," Pagan 
as well as Christian, namely the Everlasting 
Word, Jesus Christ Himself (S.John i. 9). "We 
are taught," says Justin Martyr, a pupil of the 

* Dante erred very deeply when he named the souls of individ- 
ual men as seen by him in Inferno. The mind of the Church is 
truly represented by his friend Giotto, who painted no personal or 
political enemy in his Hell, while in his Paradise, in the Bargello 
at Florence, he inserted many portraits of hostile Bianchi and 
Neri, finally in bliss and reconciled. See a very interesting arti- 
cle on "Christian Imaginations of Heaven" in the (English) 
Church Quarterly Review for 1S80. 



34 



SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 



Apostles, " that Christ is the first-born of God, 

and we have shown above that He is the Word, 

of Whom the whole human race are partakers, 

Justin Mar- and those who lived according to rea- 

tyr on the good , . 

heathen. son are Christians, even though ac- 

counted Atheists, as among the Greeks were 
Socrates, Heracleitus, and the like " (Apol. i. 46). 
" But as to these, indeed," writes Dr. Pusey, "we 
need not witness from man. God has ruled it 
for us by S. Paul. ' When the Gentiles, which 
have not the law, do by nature the things con- 
tained in the law, these, having not the law, are 
a law unto themselves : which show the work of 
the law written in their hearts ' (Rom. ii. 14, 15). 
. . . For the lover and Father of mankind," 
Dr. Pusey adds, " Who willeth not that any 
should perish, has not one way only of bringing 
home His lost sheep. All who shall be saved, 
shall be saved for the sake of that Precious Blood, 
which has redeemed our earth and arrayed it 
with Divine glory and beauty. . . . Out of 
every religion or irreligion, out of every clime, 
in whatever ignorance steeped, in whatever 
hatred or contempt or blasphemy of Christ nur- 
tured, God has His own elect, who ignorantly 
worship Him, whose ignorant fear and longing 
He Who inspired it will accept.'* * 

* Responsibility of Intellect, pp. 38, 44. 



INCREASING KNOWLEDGE IN PARADISE. 



35 



And yet, after all this has been allowed, it is 
still true that without faith, a true faith, no man 
can please God (Heb. xi. 6) or attain to everlasting 
life. " This is life eternal," saith our Lord, " that 
they might know Thee the only true 

J ° J Paradise a 

God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou f£f giSS 
hast sent " (S. John xvii. 3) ; or in the Mt ' 
echoing words of the Athanasian Creed : " Who- 
soever will be saved, before all things it is neces- 
sary that he hold the Catholic Faith." And it is 
just this work of enlightenment that Paradise 
will accomplish, and is meant to accomplish, not 
only for saintly and instructed souls, but for 
countless darkened ones with but a spark of faith, 
a spark of love, a spark of true repentance. In 
the Father's house are " many mansions " (S. John 
xiv. 2), fitted to the present capacity of every soul, 
and from which, doubtless, one after another, 
souls may be advanced to higher regions as they 
have grown in knowledge or in holiness.* Para- 
dise is a place for preparation in the knowledge 
of God. It is a place, not of knowledge forced 
or flashed mechanically, but of knowledge to be 

* Bishop Westcott's note on S. John xiv. 2 is very suggestive: 
"Our rendering comes from the Vulgate ?nansiones, which were 
resting-places, stations, on a great road, where travellers found 
refreshment. This appears to be the true meaning of the Greek 
word here [/uomd]; so that the contrasted notions of repose and 
progress are combined in this vision of the future" (Qu. in The 
Dead in Christ, by Bellett, p. 122). 



36 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

acquired, to be sought and gained, with increas- 
ing delight indeed, but not apart from that con- 
scious exercise of free will without which God 
never accomplishes anything in men on earth. 
It is in Paradise we find that rich provision of 
God's love, even for those numberless children 
of His who have passed through this world in 
ignorance of Him. " Behold how He loves 
them ! " They were deprived here of knowing 
the boundlessness of that love, the marvellous 
attractiveness of that infinite beauty. There 
they may learn more and more of both. There 
they will gradually acquire what they had not 
the capacity or the opportunity of learning here, 
that " glorious Gospel " which Christ came to 
declare on earth, and which at His own death 
He went to preach even to the spirits of those 
who long ages before had departed from earth. 
" God is not unrighteous that He will forget " 
even the least and most ignorant of His children, 
and if there be found in them but a spark of 
true faith, in Paradise He will guard and nour- 
ish it. To every soul that has not wilfully re- 
jected Him on earth He will there give the 
opportunity of knowing Him in His infinite 
perfections, and loving Him for His infinite love. 



VII. 

PURIFICATION IN PARADISE. 

We have seen, then, that increase in the know- 
ledge of God is one chief purpose of Paradise. In- 
crease in purity may well be accounted Gradual in- 

_ TT1 , . crease of holi- 

asanother. What good reason, indeed, ness another 

purpose of 

can we have for supposing that every Paradise - 
soul that enters the portals of that holy place is 
immediately and equally sanctified ? Again, let 
us remember that God's ordinary working in 
spiritual development is not by miracle or cat- 
astrophe. " First the blade, then the ear, after 
that the full corn in the ear " (S. Mark iv. 28), this 
is the law our Lord Himself lays down. And 
let us mark exactly to what He applies the law. 
Not merely to that brief part of human life which 
is passed here visibly on earth, but to the whole 
extent of life up to the Resurrection and the 
Judgment. " When the fruit is ripe " [R. V.], He 
adds, " immediately [the husbandman] putteth in 
the sickle, because the harvest has come." And 
" the harvest," our Lord distinctly tells us else- 
where (S. Matt. xiii. 39), is not the end of each 



38 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

earthly Hie, but "the end of the world." He, like 
His Apostles after Him, plainly regards the soul's 
preparation for Heaven as not completed until 
then. For howsoever it may be with some ex- 
ceptionally holy souls, is it not true of most of us 
in the rank and file of life, that the rich mellow- 
ness that makes meet for Heaven and the Beatific 
Vision does not come on earth ? There must in- 
deed be " the blade," there may be also " the ear," 
and sometimes, though, alas ! too rarely, " the full 
corn in the ear." But even so, the juices are still 
too often acrid, and ripeness has not yet come. 
" If we were to ask the most saintly character we 
know," writes Canon Luckock, " what he feels 
touching his need of cleansing, he would reply at 
once that, even after a life-long struggle to shake 
off his impurities, and with all his unwavering 
confidence in the pardoning mercy of God, and 
the sanctifying influence of the Holy Ghost, he is 
still sure that, when death approaches, he will be 
filled with a sense of utter unfitness for God's 
presence." {The Intermediate State, p. 69.) 

Nor is it of these alone that we must take ac- 
count. What shall be said of those in whom 
what shall " the blade," and only the blade, the 

be said of those 

Sar^yLthe faint, scarcely visible spike of spiritual 
liness 6 ? ° *" life, has shown itself above the icy 
chilliness and the crushing weight of untoward 



PURIFICATION IN PARADISE. 39 

earthly surroundings, or inherited tendencies? 
Theirs has been a lot of poverty and toil from 
childhood to the grave. They have been brought 
up in such ignorance and vice that there seemed 
no complete escape from its darkness or its grasp. 
Yet " there never was a doubt in the Church," 
writes Dr. Pusey, " that all who die in a state 
of grace, even although one minute before they 
were not in a state of grace, are saved. The 
whole Church is at one in this, that those only 
will be lost who, at that last hour, shut out the 
grace of God and will not ' be converted and 
live.' There is," he adds, " in this respect, abso- 
lutely no difference between the Eastern Church, 
the Western, and our own." {What is of Faith, 
p. 115.) 

But what can we say of such souls as these? 
Can it be that they are fit for Heaven, fit to gaze 
at once on the unclouded "Face" (Rev.xxii.4)? 
Only on the theory that holiness may be con- 
veyed, so to speak, mechanically, ex opere operato, 
from without, and not by the effort and self-dis- 
cipline of the will from within, working in har- 
mony with God's will and using His mighty helps. 
We can understand how, by the mere physical act 
of death, temptations and visible incentives to 
sin may be removed ; but surely this changed at- 
m osphere is not sufficient in itself to transform in 



40 



SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 



a moment the character of the soul. It is, then, for 
such as these especially — and such must ever be 
the vast multitude even of the Church — that 
Paradise has its most necessary uses. Paradise 
is still a place for growth and ripening, a summer 
land in which He Who never broke "a bruised 
reed or quenched the smoking flax " (S. Matt, 
xii. 20) will fan the faintest ember of penitence 
and love into a flame, and breathe upon the 
crushed and puny blade until it bloom and ripe 
into fitness for the Master's garner.* 

* Bishop Alexander dwells at length on this imperfect and pre- 
paratory character of life in the Middle State, as revealed in the 
Psalter. 

"The Psalmists are like the bird of spring, who, as our great 
poet says, 

'Straggling up to the hill-top, 
Shouteth faint tidings of some gladder place.' 
". . . If the view of Death, which I have above indicated, 
be Scriptural, while firmly rejecting the ['Romish'] doctrine of 
Purgatory, and the degrading superstitions which are connected 
with it, need we scruple to find a large measure of truth in the in- 
stinct which has led more than half of Christendom to use the 130th 
Psalm ['De profundis'] at funerals? . . . Certainly, we can 
well conceive that Psalm to speak the language of a soul moved 
down to a distance in strange depths, full of a sense of sin — 
'If Thou wilt keep iniquities, O Lord, who will stand?' 
yet assured of the pardon, the mercy that looses, though we be 
tied and bound with the chain of our sins. And over all is that 
strange refrain, full of longing, as of watchers looking for the 
break of dawn in some dark sky — 

'More than watchers for the morning, 
Watching for the morning.' " 

— The Witness of the Psalms, Lecture III. 



VIII. 

ANY PAIN IN THIS PURIFICATION? 

Will there be any pain in that process of purifi- 
cation, that advance from the mere rudiments of 
holiness ? Certainly nothing of a phy- wm there be 

any pain in this 

sical or semi-physical nature, such as purification? 
the horrible conceits of Rome have painted for 
men — pains which, as Hooker points out, are " in 
nothing different from those very infernal pains 
which the souls of castaways . . . do endure, 
saving only in this, there is an appointed limit 
to the one, to the other none" {Sermon on Pride, 
iii., near the end). Rome's chief error has been 
the gross materializing of the soul's discipline. 
Starting with a half truth, she has turned images 
and figures into what are indistinguishable from 
material realities. " It is, then," writes Canon 
Luckock, " the spiritual character of our future 
purification which needs to be emphasized ; and 
the enforcement of this will tend to remove 
that prejudice which Roman perversions have 
so largely created, and give us back an impor- 
tant element of Catholic truth concerning the 



42 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

state of the soul after death " (The Intermediate 
State, p. 71). 

" It was," he adds, " a Lutheran divine of the 
greatest eminence* who defied the narrow- 
mindedness of his sect and boldly taught that, 
4 in a purely spiritual sense, there must be a 
Purgatory determined for the cleansing of the 
soul in the Intermediate State.' " 

As to the character of this purification, this 

" friendly fire," as S. Gregory Nazianzen calls it, 

The spiritual I cannot do better than again quote 

character of 

this suffering. f rQ m Canon Luckock. "When the soul 
is with Christ," he says, " with Him, that is, ' Who 
is altogether lovely ; ' and when, with those quick- 
ened powers which the spirit acquires by emanci- 
pation from the flesh, it reviews its earthly life; 
in the awful contrast which it will reveal between 
Christ's absolute purity and sinlessness, His per- 
fect holiness and entire self-surrender and sacri- 
fice, and its own uncleanness and rebellion and 
selfish indulgence, it cannot do otherwise than 
suffer in the retrospect ; but the suffering," he 
adds, " must be of a spiritual kind, such, for in- 
stance, as the penitent experiences in the con- 
sciousness of past sin, though he may have no 
doubt that it has been pardoned." (Ibid. y pp. 
7h 72.) 

* Martensen, in Christ. Dogm., § 276. 



ANY PAIN IN THIS PURIFICATION? 



43 



Unless indeed God's processes on earth and in 
Paradise be wholly dissimilar, there must be 
much of truth in what Newman repre- Newman on 

this purifica- 

sents the Angel as saying- to the soul tion - 
of Gerontius. He is telling him on his entrance 
there of his approaching first interview with 
Christ, and he says of that keen yet blissful pain : 

"There is a pleading in His pensive eyes 
Will pierce thee to the quick, and trouble thee, 
And thou wilt hate and loathe thyself; for, though 
Now sinless, thou wilt feel that thou hast sinned, 
As never thou didst feel; and wilt desire 
To shirk away and hide thee from His sight; 
And yet wilt have a longing eye to dwell 
Within the beauty of His countenance. 
And these two pains, so counter and so keen — 
The longing for Him, when thou seest Him not; 
The shame of self at thought of seeing Him — 
Will be thy veriest, sharpest purgatory." 

The learned and eloquent Bishop of Derry, 
Dr. Alexander, expresses most deli- The Bish 
cately the same thought in a sonnet ° erry ' 
on " The Hope of our Forefathers " : * 

"Methought a dear one came from death's retreat: 
The pale presentment of his face was thin, 
Ruin sat grayly there, a shadow of sin. 

* Sonnets in My Library. 



44 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

Fire needed none, nor any such red beat 

Of rain as soak'd Canute's snow winding-sheet — 
Only the recollection that can win 
No pause, the footsteps that can not pass in, 

The restless recollection, the tired feet. 

'Thou art not happy?' and he answered, 'No!' 
'Come to Me! Jesus saith,' I made reply; 
'Hast thou not part in that, though so forlorn?' 

'Yes! but the time is long, and my feet slow.' 
He spake, and with a faint immortal sigh, 
Left me — yet hope grew thro' the gray of morn." 

Pusey writes in the same strain : " How each 
soul may be prepared for the Beatific Vision, 
Dr Pusey's whether very many souls may not be 
detained from that vision for a long 
time, we know not. Our human instincts suggest 
that it may be so. But if so, then those same 
human instincts tell us, that amid ' the rest and 
felicity ' of knowing that they are saved, that they 
cannot again have the very faintest wish to com- 
mit the very slightest sin, or be guilty of the 
slightest imperfection, or will anything but the 
Will of God, the temporary banishment from the 
sight of God will be intense purifying suffering." 
And yetitmustbe remembered on the other hand, 
he says, that " the most imperfect souls, even 
while unadmitted to the sight of God, have un- 
speakable joy — joy beyond all possible joy in this 



ANY PAIN IN THIS PURIFICATION? 



45 



present life, from the certainty of their salvation, 
from their being confirmed in grace and love, 
from the impossibility of their ever again, by the 
very slightest motion of their will, willing any- 
thing but the all-holy Will of God, and from the 
unspeakable love infused into them by God." 
( What is of Faith, pp. 115, 117.)* 

* This is in substance the view expressed by Dante in his Pur- 
gatorio, showing how much as a theologian, as well as a poet, he 
was above the popular ideas of his time. In the Purgatorio at 
least there is nothing of that gross materialistic representation of 
suffering which forms such a conspicuous part of what our Article 
XXII. justly condemns as the "Romish [Romanensium] Doc- 
trine concerning Purgatory." How different from the gross popu- 
lar idea, for instance, is the character of purgatorial discipline 
suggested by the exquisite picture of the arrival of a new company 
of disembodied souls from earth. They are in charge of a glori- 
ous angel, "visibly written blessed in his looks," while, 
" 'When Israel came out of Egypt,' they 
All with one voice together sang, with what 
In the remainder of that hymn is writ." 

(Canto II.) 
They chant, that is, the thankful song that proclaims their de- 
liverance from the "Egyptian bondage" of world and flesh. Pain 
indeed, they know, awaits them still; much difficult struggling up- 
ward from circle to circle, "purging as they go the world's 
gross darkness off." This, however, is no longer a condition of 
slavish but of willing, even "eager," service. Backs there may 
be bent under the burden of heavy stones, and eyes to which 
"Heaven is a niggard of his fair light." (Canto X. 100; XL 29; 
XIII. 62.) But all this is only the symbolism of an intensified 
repentance. It is not physical torture, but penitential sorrow, 
borne in patience, as surely leading on to blessedness; 

"scars 
That when they pain thee worst, then kindliest heal." 

(Canto XV. 80.) 



46 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

For even when suffering most, the souls in Purgatory are 

"at peace with God, 
Who with desire to see Him fills their heart." 

(Canto V. 55.) 

According to the Dantean vision, "You will always desire the 
pains which make you perfect until you are fit for another circle 
of purification; or for the final deliverance. When every stain is 
effaced on the stage, then only shall you desire to pass on to fur- 
ther discipline, or in cleanness every whit. Your will, at least, is 
now with God, and so shall you be at the day appointed. What- 
ever manifold meaning history and poetry may extract from 
Dante's Purgatorio, there seems to be no doubt that he meant it 
to be an image of his own experience of the penitent life on earth." 
("Christian Imaginations of Heaven," in English Church Quar- 
terly Review for 1880.) 

In view of what Dante's "mediaeval miracle of song," in spite 
of its manifest faults and inconsistencies, has done and may yet do 
for larger thoughts concerning the government of God, one cannot 
but sympathize with Longfellow's enthusiastic apostrophe to this 
first and greatest of modern religious poets: 

"O star of morning and of liberty! 

O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines 
Above the darkness of the Apennines, 
Forerunner of the day that is to be! 

The voices of the city and the sea, 

The voices of the mountains and the pines, 
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines 
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy! 

Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights, 
Through all the nations, and a sound is heard 
As of a mighty wind, and men devout — 

Strangers of Rome and the new proselytes — 

In their own language hear thy wondrous word, 
And many are amazed, and many doubt." 

— Divina Commedia. 



IX. 

LIFE IN PARADISE ACTIVE. 

There are three inferences, from what I have 
said hitherto, to which I wish to call attention in 
conclusion. In the first place, the Chris- Three infer- 
tian conception, or rather revelation, Sfinliadise 

active as well as 

of Paradise is not that of a state of mere contemplative. 
idle rest, a condition of the soul only dimly con- 
scious, and approaching nearer to the Nirwana of 
Buddhism than to real existence * Activity is of 
the very essence of the Christian ideal. Madame 
de StaeTs definition of happiness as "constant oc- 
cupation in congenial work, with the full exercise 
of our powers, and with a continued sense of prog- 
ress/'f is surely as applicable to the lifein Paradise 
as to that on earth. The only possible alternative 
to this is " a state of gratified and glorified selfish- 
ness." Pascal felt this so strongly that he did not 
hesitate to declare that the want of occupation 

* When Holy Scripture speaks of Christians " falling asleep,'* 
it is surely needless to point out that this sleep has only to do with 
the body. On the other hand, the soul is said to be "quick- 
ened" when the body "sleeps" (i Peter hi. 18). 

t Quoted by Bishop Carpenter, in his Bampton Lectures. 



48 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

would turn Heaven into Hell. "My Father work- 
eth hitherto, and I work," said our Lord (S. 
John v. 17). Work, then, there must be in the 
second Eden as in the first. There the various 
powers of the soul are not diminished, but "quick- 
ened" (1 Pet. iii. 18) * increased, and intensified. 
Faculties of whose possession we are here only 
dimly conscious, or else wholly unconscious, are 
there set free and developed into activity. The 
life beyond is buta higher stage of this life. It is 
Dante's firm hold of this truth, Dean Church says, 
that gives to his great Commedia so much of its pro- 
found interest. " He faces and grasps the tre- 
mendous thought that the very men and women 
whom we see and speak to are now the real rep- 
resentatives of sin and goodness, the true actors 
in that scene. . . . What he struggles to ex- 
press in countless ways, with all the resources of 
his strange and gigantic power, is that this world 
and the next are both equally real, and both one 
— parts, however different, of one whole" {Dante, 
by R. W. Church, pp. 78, 80). Only there, earthly 
difficulties are removed. No matter how low the 
soul's rank may be, there it is no longer on pro- 
bation. The clogs and hindrances of a degenerate 
body, the temptations of a sinful material world, 

♦"Spirit" is here undoubtedly the human, not the Divine 
Spirit. See R. V. in loco. 



LIFE IN PARADISE ACTIVE. 



49 



and of a powerful spiritual f oe,have wholly ceased 
to exist. "The weariness, the fever, and the fret " 
are gone. The soul is no longer trammelled and 
fettered, compelled to fight for very life in an ene- 
my's country. It is now in God's land. It is 
free, free to love, free to will and to obey, free 
to worship and to work, as it never was in the 
days of its earthly existence.* 

And this, I believe, is the meaning which is in- 
tended to be conveyed by that great "Voice from 
Heaven" concerning the " works" of 

"La bours " 

those who "rest." Observe the full past, "works" 

continuing 1 n 

force of the contrast there. On the one Paradise - 
hand, it is said, " They rest from their labours ; " 
on the other, "Their works do follow them." 
Here on earth, both are the lot of man, both 
labours and works. It is still true, as the Psalmist 
said of old, " Man goeth forth to his work, and to 
his labour, until the evening" (Ps. civ. 23). f It 

* S. Augustine says: "In this Divine gift there was to be ob- 
served this gradation, that man should first receive a free will by 
which he was able not to sin, and at last a free will by which 
he was not able to sin — the former being adapted to the ac- 
quiring of merit, the latter to the enjoying of the reward." And 
in answer to an objection that may be urged against this, he asks, 
"Are we to say that God Himself is not free because He cannot 
sin?" (De Civ. Dei, xxii. 30.) 

f Over a space of more than twenty years, the memory of a very 
beautiful sermon on this text, by the Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix, comes 
vividly back, though I do not remember the preacher speaking of 
the continuance of works beyond the grave, a subject with which 
he was not dealing at the time. 



50 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

must be so in a sin-laden world ; pain and sor- 
row, the racked and worn body, and the troubled 
spirit, linked inseparably with the work done, 
even as shadow is to substance. Only at death, 
the eventide, the change, the relief comes. 
" Work and labour until the evening." Then the 
labour passes away, but not so the work. That 
does not pass. That is no part of the painful- 
ness of life. Work is of God. "My Father 
worketh, and I work." 

I do not say that this is the whole meaning of 
this great " Voice." I think the thought of works 
already accomplished, wrought on earth by the 
grace, and purified by the Blood, of Christ, and 
then following on in their effects to be crowned 
by Him, and to be a measure of His reward of the 
worker — this thought is not lost sight of. But 
yet, no more is that other to be overlooked, which 
I have already expressed — the thought of works 
continuing — works from which there is no rest, 
because, even in the life to come, they are of the 
very essence of the soul's blessedness. 

And this contrast of " labours " past and 

"works" continuing is brought out more dis- 

"Their works tinctly in the original than our Author- 

f ollow with 

them." j ze d Version allows us to perceive. 

Literally the passage reads, and is so translated in 
the Revised Version, "that they may rest from 



LIFE IN PARADISE ACTIVE. 51 

their labours, for their works follow with them." 
There is no night in death for the Christian work- 
er. To him all is light and all is day. In Paradise 
the soul does not cease to work. To will, to love, to 
minister to others, to worship,* to contemplate, to 
meditate upon God and His perfections, this is no 
idle task for those who really attempt it, but one 
calling into vigorous play the very highest facul- 
ties. And this is still the soul's blessed portion, 
only with renewed and added powers, in the land 
of light, " the land of the living." " Their works 
follow with them." fhat was no mere affection- 
ate weakness of a loving father which is told of 
the saintly and aged Pusey concerning his son, 
the devout and learned editor of the writings 
of S. Cyril. Not many weeks after his son's 
death, Canon Liddon tells us that Dr. Pusey said 
to him in the course of conversation, " I can- 
not help hoping that if dear Philip is allowed, 
now or hereafter, to be anywhere near S. Cyril 
in another world, S. Cyril may be able to show 

* Much might be written on this if space allowed. It is evi- 
dent that the worship described in the book of Revelation (see 
especially chapters v., vii. and xix.) is largely that of Paradise. 
"It is not on earth alone that the Church commemorates the 
Sacrifice of the Lamb. 'The Lamb that was slain' is, even more 
especially and more fully, the Object of the adoration of the 
Church at rest and of the Church triumphant. The song of the 
Passion is still heard; its echoes are still ringing in the courts of 
Paradise" (J. P. F. Davidson, A Sermon). 



52 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

him some kindness, considering all that Philip has 
done in these later years to make S. Cyril's writ- 
ings better known to our countrymen." (Preface 
to vol. ii. of the English Translation of S. Cyril) 
The hope here expressed, we may well believe, 
was no mere result of the warm fancy of a devout 
father. Rather did it have its strong foundation 
in the calm, clear faith, and the sober reason of a 
great theologian, to whom Paradise and Heaven 
were no lands of shadow, but true and abiding 
realities. 



LIFE IN PARADISE ORGANIZED. 

But this is not all. It is not merely that the 
life of Paradise is a life of holy employments, of 
continuance in good works. It seems ( 2 > T he life 

... . i i • r i * n Paradise an 

necessary to believe that the life there organized life. 
is an organized life ; that the works of each 
separate soul are part of a great system of work. 
Let us bear in mind that when a soul is borne 
away by angels from this earth, it is by no 
means cut off from the Catholic Church, the great 
organized Society of the faithful. It is still a 
member of Christ's Body. " The gates of Hell," * 

* It is certainly very unfortunate that this English word is so 
ambiguous, and that our mother-tongue, ever so ready "to enter- 
tain strangers" from every quarter, should so long and so per- 
sistently have refused to adopt here the original Greek word 
Hades. Hades, both in the New Testament and in the Septua- 
gint or Greek translation of the Old, is the name for the common 
receptacle of all disembodied spirits, including both Paradise and 
"Tartarus" (see the Greek in 2 Peter ii. 4). Gehenna is the 
name of the place of final punishment in body and soul. Yet in 
our A. V. both are translated by one and the self-same word 
"hell," to the utter confusion of instructed as well as simple 
folk! As "hell" is ineradicably associated in the Anglo-Saxon 
mind and literature with the latter place, it is surely best to leave 
it there and simply transliterate the Greek word <L$t)s (Hades), in- 



54 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

that is, of Hades or the "unseen" world, cannot 
" prevail against " Christ's Body to divide it asun- 
der (S. Matt. xvi. 18). The holy dead are still in 
the full communion of the Catholic Church. And 
think what this implies — the corporate, the social, 
the united life of the soul still continues. The 
existence of any unit, independent and unrelated 
to other units, is an impossibility anywhere in 
God's universe. This is especially true of the 
Church. " None of us liveth to himself, and no 
man dieth to himself" writes S. Paul, evidently 
with this very thought in view (Rom. xiv. 7). 
Life in Paradise is still a corporate, an organized 
life, with relations and duties to other souls as 
well as with relations and duties to God. It 
must for this reason be also a varied life, a life of 
orders and ranks and governments, as well as of 
"many mansions" (S. John xiv. 2) and wide 
diversities of gifts and powers. There must still 
be "joints and bands" in this " one communion 
and fellowship." Much of our popular unimagin- 
ative thought has "squeezed all flat" there, has 
left us nothing but a tiresome monotony of " saved 
souls," individual and isolated and separate. But 

stead of attempting to translate it. This is what the last revisers of 
the New Testament have done in every case, and it is earnestly 
to be hoped that the word may thus become in time the universal 
one of the language, both written and spoken, and in the Creed 
as well as in the Scriptures. 



LIFE IN PARADISE ORGANIZED. 55 

a moment's consideration will convince us that it 
must be as true of the life of that unseen portion 
of Christ's Body as it is of the seen, The analogy 

. of the Church 

that " the body is not one member but <>*■ earth. 
many" (1 Cor. xii. 12), and that "all members 
have not the same office" (Rom. xii. 4), and that 
" God hath tempered the body together. . . . 
that there should be no schism in the body; but 
that the members should have the same care one 
for another" (1 Cor. xii. 24, 25). Only there is 
this difference. In Paradise " differences of min- 
istries " (1 Cor. xii. 5, margin) and of "office" 
are measured by absolutely just and equal stand- 
ards, and not by the imperfect ones of this world 
(S. Matt. xx. 23). 

Moreover, the analogy of the angelic world 
teaches us the same lesson. The life there is re- 
vealed to us everywhere in Holy Scrip- The analogy 

. of the angelic 

ture as an ordered army, an organized world. 
state, a kingdom, a polity of unequal, vastly di- 
verse, personal intelligences. It has its ranks, 
its degrees, its various celestial nationalities, so to 
speak. Daniel speaks of " princes " in the heaven- 
ly host, and Holy Scripture elsewhere gives us at 
least nine great orders of the celestial hierarchy, 
angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, 
dominions, virtues, principalities, powers (Col. i. 
16; Eph. i. 21). And if this be so in God's per- 



56 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

feet kingdom in Heaven, if His Name there is the 
God of " Sabaoth " or ordered armies, if, as our 
Lord expressly tells us, His Apostles were des- 
tined to occupy positions there of honour and 
power above their fellows (S. Matt. xix. 28), and if 
other worthy servants shall have places of rule 
and government "according to their several 
ability" (S. Luke xix. 17, 19), surely 
afchJTn p££- Paradise can be no exception. On the 
one hand there is the soul of the little 
child that has never known the hardship of life's 
battle, only saved by the love of Christ; on 
the other there is the scarred and wounded, yet 
conquering, soul of a S. Paul or a S. Augustine, 
each with its place of bliss, but each with a very 
different place, each with its work, but each 
with a very different work. 

And all this implies the continuation in Para- 
dise of those "diversities" and " differences " of 
" administrations " and "operations," that order, 
government, hierarchy, those "joints and bands" 
in the Body of Christ, of which S. Paul speaks as 
a necessity in the Church, on earth (Col. ii. 19). 
And what their purpose is here, so will it be there, 
"for the perfecting of the saints, . . . for the 
edifying of the Body of Christ, until we all come 
in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of 
the Son of God unto a perfect man [observe, not 



LIFE IN PARADISE ORGANIZED. 



57 



a perfect soul, but a perfect man, body and soul], 
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of 
Christ" (Eph. iv. 12, 13). The analogy of our 
present existence, as well as the teaching- of Holy 
Scripture, leads us, then, to believe that God's 
government in Paradise is carried on by means of 
human as well as angelic agencies, and that pro- 
gress in knowledge and in grace comes, not only 
by the individual efforts of the human will in a 
purer, holier atmosphere, but through the minis- 
tries of others in instruction, in guidance, in in- 
tercessory prayer and mutual offices of love. 

We have at least one marked instance of such a 
ministry revealed in Holy Scripture, concerning 
the character of which there can be no our Lord's 
possibility of doubt. Our Lord sjour- inParadise. 
ney to Paradise between the moment of His death 
and His resurrection, that event which in the 
creed we call His " descent into Hell " or Hades, 
has much more of instruction for us on this point 
than we are accustomed to see in it. Who can 
doubt that God could have flashed the light of 
His gospel directly on those spirits "sometime 
disobedient" (1 Pet.iii. 19, 20), but now repentant, 
dwelling "in a safe place" ("prison," A. V.) in 
some of those "many mansions" of the blessed 
dead? Who can doubt that He could have made 
that (it may be) larger company of " the dead," of 



58 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

which S. Peter speaks later (i v. 6), to know, with- 
out any intervening agency whatever, the glori- 
ous news of His completed work of love for 
their redemption? And yet such is not God's 
method. The Soul of the Son of Man, the 
"Apostle" of the Father (Heb. iii. i), must jour- 
ney (iropevdeU) in person to "preach the gospel 
also to them that are dead," even as He had done 
and would do, by others, to the living. 

It was the thorough realization of this fact by 

the early Church, the recognition of its need as 

well as of its greatness, that led it to 

Early opin- 
ions concern- conclude, as it seems to have done, that 

ing Apostles ' 

^ach&g^fn the ministry of the Apostles, also, was 
not ended when their sun set below this 
earth's horizon. Even in this respect they were 
imitators of their Lord and "Forerunner." 
Hermas, a pupil of the Apostles, and whose book 
The Shepherd, was for some time read publicly 
as inspired, declares that the "Apostles and 
teachers who preached the Name of the Son of 
God, after falling asleep in the power and faith 
of the Son of God, preached it to those who 
were asleep," and that "by these were they 
quickened and made to know the Name of the 
Son of God" (IILxvi.). Clement of Alexandria, 
in the same century, more than once makes a 
similar assertion. (Strom. II. ix.; VI. vi.) 



LIFE IN PARADISE ORGANIZED 59 

What can be more natural than this? Does it 
not help us to understand how a man with such 
tireless energies as S. Paul, could " desire to 
depart and to be with Christ" (Phil. i. 23), not to 
pass his time there in mere slumberous or con- 
templative rest, but in continued though unlabo- 
rious ministries for those in Paradise who still 
needed his instruction and his help? " I know 

nothing in the records of the death- f. d. Mau- 

i »» • t-\ " ce an< ^ im- 
beds of great teachers, writes Dean Pusey. 

Plumptre," more touching or more characteristic 
than the words which fell from the lips of Fred- 
erick Maurice, when he was told that his life's 
work on earth must be looked upon as ended, 
that he must never preach again. ' If I may 
not preach here,' he said, ' I may preach in other 
worlds.' " {Spirits in Prison, p. 392.) * 

And in this thought of the continued ministries 
of Paradise, surely we may find much to satisfy 
our intellect as well as to console our This view of 

, _ , , 1 r . continued min- 

heart over the early removal of strong istries explains 

many difficul- 

and brave and holy souls, whose work ties - 
seemed to us so needful to the Church on earth. 
How difficult it is to understand the reasons why 
a youthful S. Stephen, possessed of great natural 

* In perfect keeping with this is the quiet remark of Dr. Pusey 
in regard to S. Cyril, already quoted on p. 51. Compare also 
an incident related by Dean Burgon in his Lives 0} Twelve Good 
Men, Vol. II. p. 418. 



60 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

ability and spiritual power; why martyrs like Pat- 
teson and Hannington, or martyrs of another kind 
like our own DeKoven and Armitage and Elliott 
and Brown and Harris and Boone, besides laymen 
and lay women whom we could name by the score 
should be cut off in the fulness of their strength, 
when their sun seemed to be only at high noon. 
But who that remembers Christ's own earthly 
life of only thirty-three years, followed as it was 
by a ministry 

"at large among the dead, 
Whether in Eden bowers [His] welcome voice 
Wake Abraham to rejoice; 
Or in some drearier scene [His] eye controls 
The thronging band of souls," — * 

who, that remembers this revealed fact, need 
doubt that the ministries alike of great martyr, 
great bishop or priest, holy layman or lay woman, 
and humble child — ministries once exercised in 
the Body of Christ on earth — are still being exer- 
cised in that same unbroken Body in Paradise, 
each in their various spheres, and under a sky 
where no defect of the flesh and no power of Satan 
can mar the effectiveness of their loving service? 
It has been beautifully said of those whose chief 
delight here was in the study of God's words and 
ways, that hereafter they may well be imagined as 

* Christian Year, " Easter Eve." 



LIFE IN PARADISE ORGANIZED. 6 1 

" bending themselves to the task of tutoring the 
less gifted or less enlightened, perhaps utterly 
heathen, souls in Divine Science ; and finding 
eternally in this a deeper blessedness than the 
loftiest attainments of man or seraph could ever 
yield." (Contemporary Review, No. xvii. p. 140, 
qu. by Luckock.) Or, as the same thought has 
been happily expressed in verse: 

"He too is there,* and can we dream 
Their joy is other now than when 
They dwelt among the sons of men 
As walking in the eternal gleam? 

Are there no souls behind the veil 
That need the help of guiding hand; 
Weak hearts that cannot understand 

Why earth's poor dreams of Heaven must fail? 

Are there no prison-doors to ope, 

No lambs to gather in the fold, 

No treasure-house of new and old 
To meet each wish and crown each hope? 

We know not; but if life be there 
The outcome and the crown of this, 
What else can make their perfect bliss 

Than in the Master's work to share?" * 

* Things New and Old, by Dean Plumptre, p. 143. "He 
too is there," refers to Frederick Denison Maurice. Compare 
Lowell's lines on the death of Channing: 

"Thou art not idle: in thy higher sphere 

Thy loving spirit bends itself to loving tasks; 
And strength, to perfect what it dreamed of here, 
Is all the crown and glory that it asks." 



XI. 

SHALL WE PRAY FOR THOSE IN PARADISE? 

After all that has been written hitherto it will 
not be necessary to say much concerning the third 
( 3 ) Prayer inference that I propose to draw from 
departed. my discussion of " Some Purposes of 
Paradise." The fitness of prayers, not to, but for 
and by the dwellers in those " many mansions," 
follows as necessarily as the fitness of prayer for 
or by any absent friends. Are not " they with us, 
and we with them," still members of the same 
Body and "members one of another'* (Rom. 
xii. 5) ? Why then, it may well be asked, should 
such mutual offices of love and affection cease, 
when one who is near and dear has passed merely 
" within the veil ? " They prayed for each other, 
they loved each other here. Can it be that be- 
cause they are now in different rooms in God's 
great household, this interchange of kindly acts 
must cease for ever? Far be such a thought from 
every tender heart ! If even the ungodly rich 
man, in the story related by our Lord Himself, 
had thought and compassion for his brethren in 



SHALL WE PRAY FOR THOSE IN PARADISE? 63 

the world, and interceded for them, how much 
more those who are bound to us in the unity of 
Christ's Body as well as by natural affection. 
And if they can and do pray for us, why may not 
we also pray for them ? Is it that they D they 

need our pray- 

do not need, or have passed beyond the ers? 
benefit of our prayers ? That cannot be so long 
as Heaven is not yet attained. They too " desire 
a better country." They, like us, are still waiting 
for the end, asking, " How long, O Lord?" (Rev. 
vi. 10.) " If I might attain unto the resurrection 
of the dead" (Phil. iii. 11)— that was S. Paul's 
final hope and aim. Nothing less could satisfy 
him. That too is still his hope and aim, as it is 
theirs also in Paradise. Life there is indeed 
blessed, even for those who need most its enlight- 
enment and its discipline. But no life of man 
can have its " perfect consummation of bliss " 
apart from the risen, the glorified body , made like 
unto Christ's. Man's body is no mere accidental 
appendage of his soul, but rather the soul's neces- 
sary organ, without which it cannot " be made 
perfect" (Heb. xi. 40). 

Here, then, as well as in that progressive prep- 
aration for Heaven, we find abundant reason and 
necessity for not ceasing to pray for the departed . 
Paradise is but the scaling of one glorious sunlit 
height, that we may gain from thence the view of 



64 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

heights to be attained more glorious still. For it 
is true of the blessed dead, even of those in the 
highest " mansions " in Paradise, that their " eye 
hath not [yet] seen, nor ear heard, neither have 
[yet] entered into [their] heart the things which 
God hath prepared for them that love Him " 
(i Cor. ii. 9). It is still with them a time of faith 
and hope, " God having provided some better 
thing for us, that they without us should not be 
made perfect" (Heb. xi. 40). 

I may fitly quote here in conclusion some 
touching verses, not by a Churchman, whether 
Anglican or Roman, but by a minister of the 
Scotch Presbyterian kirk. They may be offered 
as an instance of the natural and righteous in- 
stinct of the human heart, breaking through the 
barriers of inherited prejudice, and witnessing 
to what is in truth only Scriptural and Catholic 
doctrine and practice. 

"O'er land and sea, love follows with fond prayers 
Its dear ones in their troubles, grief and cares; 

There is no spot 
On which it does not drop this tender dew, 
Except the grave, and there it bids adieu, 

And prayeth not. 

Why should that be the only place uncheered 
By prayer, which to our hearts is most endeared, 



SHALL WE PRAY FOR THOSE IN PARADISE? 6$ 

And sacred grown ? 
Living, we sought for blessings on their head ; 
Why should our lips be sealed when they are dead, 

And we alone ? 

Idle ? their doom is fixed ? Ah ! Who can tell ? 
Yet, were it so, I think no harm could well 

Come of my prayer : 
And O the heart, o'erburdened with its grief, 
This comfort needs, and finds therein relief 

From its despair. 

Shall God be wroth because we love them still, 
And call upon His love to shield from ill 

Our dearest, best, 
And bring them home, and recompense their pain, 
And cleanse their sin, if any sin remain, 

And give them rest ? 

Nay, I will not believe it. I will pray 
As for the living, for the dead each day. 

They will not grow 
Less meet for Heaven when followed by a prayer 
To speed them home, like summer -scented air 

From long ago. 

Who shall forbid the heart's desires to flow 
Beyond the limit of the things we know ? 

In Heaven above 
The incense that the golden censers bear, 
Is the sweet perfume from the saintly prayer 

Of trust and love." * 

* Walter C. Smith, Edinburgh, 1887. 



66 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

The following tender lines exolain most beau- 
tifully the same thought : 

I WILL PRAY, AS FOR THE LIVING, SO FOR THE 
DEAD, EACH DAY 

How can I cease to pray for thee? Somewhere 
In God's great universe thou art to-day. 

Can He not reach thee with His tender care? 
Can He not hear me when for thee I pray? 

What matters it to Him who holds within 
The hollow of His hand all worlds, all space, 

That thou art done with earthly pain and sin? 
Somewhere within His ken thou hast a place. 

Somewhere thou livest, and hast need of Him: 
Somewhere thy soul sees higher heights to climb; 

And somewhere still, there may be valleys dim 
That thou must pass to reach the hills Sublime! 

Then all the more because thou canst not hear 
Poor human words of blessing, will I pray — 

O true, brave heart! God bless thee! wheresoe'er 
In His great universe thou art to-day! 

—Julia Doer. 




XII. 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEPARTED. 

In the foregoing essay it was no part of my ob- 
ject to give proofs of the Scriptural, Primitive, and 
Catholic character of prayers for the faithful de- 
parted. It may be well, however, to indicate 
briefly here the leading reasons why such a prac- 
tice should commend itself to our judgment. 

(i) Such prayer was the universal custom of or- 
thodox Jews, for at least a century and a half be- 
fore Christ. 

This is evidenced by the act of Judas Maccabaeus 
and his companions in " betaking themselves unto 
prayer," and in sending to Jerusalem two thousand 
drachms of silver as a sin-off ering for some soldiers 
who had fallen in battle. " Doing therein," the 
writer adds, "very well and honestly, in that he 
was mindful of the resurrection ; for if he had not 
hoped that they that were slain should have risen 
again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for 
the dead " (2 Mace. xii. 42, 43, 44). During our 



68 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

Lord's life and that of His Apostles this was 
doubtless the custom in every Jewish synagogue 
and home, as it is to-day. 

(2) Such prayer seems to have had the tacit 
approval of our Lord. 

"Now it is very considerable," writes Bishop 
Jeremy Taylor, " that since our Blessed Lord did 
reprove all the doctrines and traditions of the 
scribes and Pharisees, and did argue concerning 
the dead and the resurrection, yet He spake no 
word against this public practice, but left it as He 
found it ; which He, Who came to declare the will 
of His Father, would not have done if it had not 
been innocent, pious, and full of charity." {Liberty 
of Prophesying, I. 345.) 

(3) Such prayer is implied, if not expressed, in 
the New Testament. 

The whole tone of the New Testament, making 
as it does the resurrection of the body, and not 
the death of the body, the final goal of all Chris- 
tian thought and progress, implies continued 
prayer for " all saints " (Eph. vi. 1 8), not even ex- 
cepting those passed out of sight, as Onesiphorus 
(2 Tim. i. 18).* 

* "In the judgment of many Protestant commentators (Elli- 
cott, Bengel, Alford, DeWette), the prayer of S. Paul for One- 
siphorus as distinct from his household, that ' he may find mercy 
of the Lord in that day,' is probably a sample of such prayers 
(2 Tim. i. 16-18)." (PLUMPTRE, Spirits in Prison, p. 266.) It 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEPARTED. 69 

(4) Prayer for the faithful dead was certainly 
the universal custom of the Primitive Church, as 
witnessed by the liturgies without exception, and 
the sepulchral inscriptions. 

"The argument from the universality of the 
practice to its primitive antiquity is absolutely ir- 
resistible." * 

(5) Prayer for the faithful dead was the univer- 
sal custom of the Church of England down to 
1552. 

The first Reformed Prayer-Book of 1 549 had dis- 
tinct provision for such prayer at the celebration 
of the Holy Communion, and in the Burial Office 
(see below, pp. 73, 74, 75). It is this book which 
has been pronounced by an eminent authority, 
Archdeacon Hardwick, to be " the noblest monu- 
ment of piety, of prudence, and of learning which 
the sixteenth century constructed." It is worthy of 
note also that for one hundred and thirteen years, 
that is, until the revision of 1662, no other Prayer 
Book had the joint sanction of the Bishops and 
clergy of the Church as represented in Convoca- 
tion, and of the laity as represented in Parliament. 

In 1552, owing to the meddling interference of 

is easy to understand, however, why Holy Scripture should not 
make such a practice prominent, desiring rather to emphasize the 
paramount importance of this present life as the only " day of sal- 
vation " during which men maybe tried or proved (2 Cor. vi. 1, 2). 
* Plumptre, p. 271. 



JO SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

foreign Protestants, the prayers were made less 
explicit, but prayer for the departed was neither 
forbidden nor excluded. It was only made less 
prominent. 

The petition in the present Burial Office, "that 
we, with all those that are departed in the true 
faith, etc.," may be regarded as an instance in 
point. If, however, it be thought that there is 
any ambiguity about this, there can be none what- 
ever in the petition in the Holy Communion, 
that " we and all Thy whole Church may obtain re- 
mission of our sins, and all other benefits of His 
Passion." Concerning this latter, Bishop Cosin, one 
of the committee of revision in 1662, says, " By l all 
the whole Church* is to be understood, as well 
those that have been heretofore, and those that 
shall be hereafter, as well as those that are now 
the present members of it." 

(6) To the above reasons may be added the fact 
that some of the best, most learned, and most loy- 
al divines of the English Church, such as Bishops 
Andrewes, Cosin, Jeremy Taylor, Ussher, Overall 
(the reputed author of the latter half of the 
Church Catechism), Ken, Heber, to go no further, 
have taught and practised prayer for the faith- 
ful dead. John Wesley and the devout non-con- 
formist, Richard Baxter, may also be quoted 
as approving of the practice. (See Christian Doc- 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEPARTED. yi 

trine of Prayer for the Departed, by Dr. F. G. 
Lee.) 

Some beautiful examples of prayers for the 
faithful departed are given below. It will be no- 
ticed that in none of them (and this is true of all 
such prayers in the ancient liturgies) is there any 
suggestion of that gross, material, or semi-material 
torture which forms such a prominent feature of 
the popular Roman doctrine of Purgatory. 

The following is from the liturgy of S. James, 
used in the Churches of Jerusalem and the neigh- 
bouring countries : 

" Remember, Lord, the God of the spirits and 
all flesh, the Orthodox whom we have commemo- 
rated, from righteous Abel unto this day. Give 
them rest there, in the land of the living, in Thy 
kingdom, in the delight of Paradise, in the bosom 
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, our holy fathers, 
whence pain, sorrow, and groaning is exiled, where 
the light of Thy countenance looks down and 
always shines " ( Translations of the Primitive 
Liturgies, by Neale and Littledale, p. 54). 

The following is from the liturgy of S. Clem- 
ent, an offshoot of the S. James liturgy : 

"At Thy spiritual and holy altar, O Lord, give 
rest, good memory and happiness to all the bodies, 
souls and spirits of our fathers, brothers and sis- 
ters, whether of the flesh or of the spirit, who, in 



j 2 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

whatever countries, cities or states, have departed 
this life ; whether they have been drowned in seas 
and rivers, or have died in their journeyings, and 
of whom no memorial remaineth in the Churches 
existing upon earth In the taberna- 
cles of shadow and rest grant them the treasures 
of felicity, whence every sorrow is excluded, and 
where the souls of the righteous, without labour, 
expect the first-fruits of eternal life, and where the 
spirits of just men, being made perfect, wait for the 
fruition of their promised reward ; where they 
who have been called to that feast, wait till they 
go up to the same, and earnestly desire the new 
state of glory; where sorrows are banished away 
and joys remain" (Dr. F. G. Lee's Prayers for 
the Departed, p. 54). 

No prayers, however, exceed in beauty and ten- 
derness the following, taken from the Burial Ser- 
vice of the Church of England as it existed before 
the Reformation. 

" . . . O God, we humbly beseech Thee 
that whatever this Thy servant may have con- 
tracted of evil contrary to Thy will, by the deceit 
of the devil or his own iniquity and frailness, Thou, 
in Thy pity and compassion, wouldest wash away 
by Thy clemency, and command that his soul be 
borne by the hands of Thy holy angels into the 
bosom of Thy patriarchs, of Abraham Thy friend, 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEPARTED. 73 

and Isaac Thy chosen, and Jacob Thy beloved, 
where grief and sorrow and sighing flee away, and 
the souls of the faithful are in joy and felicity." 

" Give unto them eternal rest, O Lord, and let 
Thy perpetual light shine on them." 

" May the angels lead thee into Paradise, and 
the martyrs receive thee into their company and 
bring thee to the city, the heavenly Jerusalem." 

" Grant, O Almighty Father, to the spirit of 
this our brother, whom Thou hast called from the 
troubled waves of this world, a calm, bright place 
of refreshment and of calm. Let him pass by the 
gates of hell and the pains of darkness, and remain 
in the abodes {inansionibus) of the saints, and in 
the holy light which Thou didst promise of old to 
Abraham and to his seed. Do thou blot out all 
his sins to the uttermost farthing, that so he may 
attain with Thee to the life of Thy immortality 
and to Thy eternal Kingdom " (Maskell, Mo?ium. 
Ritual., i. pp. 1 14-129, translated and quoted by 
Dean Plumptre, pp. 272-3). 

From the first reformed Prayer Book (1549) we 
take the following, the first quotation being from 
the prayer " For the whole state of Christ's 
Church " (the original of our prayer " For the 
whole state of Christ's Church Militant"), the 
second and third from the Burial Service : 

"We commend unto Thy mercy, O Lord, all 



74 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

other Thy servants which are departed hence 
from us with the sign of faith, and now do rest in 
the sleep of peace : grant unto them, we beseech 
Thee, Thy mercy and everlasting peace ; and that, 
at the Resurrection, we and all they which be of 
the Mystical Body of Thy Son, may altogether 
be set on His right hand, and hear that His most 
joyful voice : Come unto Me, O ye that be blessed 
of My Father, and possess the Kingdom which is 
prepared for you from the beginning of the world. 
Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ's sake, our 
only Mediator and Advocate." 

" We commend into Thy hands of mercy, most 
merciful Father, the soul of this our brother. 
. . Grant, we beseech thee, that at the Day 
of Judgment his soul, and all the souls of Thy 
elect departed out of this life, may with us and 
we with them, fully receive Thy promises, and be 
made perfect altogether through the glorious 
resurrection of Thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord." 

The following is the concluding prayer of the 
Burial Service of 1549. It is taken to a large ex- 
tent from one in the pre-Reformation service. 

" O Lord, with Whom do live the spirits of 
them that be dead, and in Whom the souls of 
them that be elected, after they be delivered from 
the burden of the flesh, be in joy and felicity ; 
Grant unto this Thy servant, that the sins which 



PRAYERS FOR THE DEPARTED. 75 

he committed in this world be not imputed unto 
him ; but that he, escaping the gates of hell and 
pains of eternal darkness, may ever dwell in the 
region of light, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, 
in the place where is no weeping, sorrow nor 
heaviness ; and when that Dreadful Day of the 
general Resurrection shall come, make him to rise 
also with the just and righteous, and receive this 
body again to glory, then made pure and incor- 
ruptible. Set him on the right hand of Thy Son 
Jesus Christ, among Thy holy and elect, that 
then he may hear with them these most sweet 
and comfortable words : Come to Me, ye blessed 
of My Father, possess the kingdom which hath 
been prepared for you from the beginning of the 
world. Grant this, we beseech Thee, O merciful 
Father, through Jesus Christ, our Mediator and 
Redeemer. Amen." 



XIII. 

HEAVEN. 

It is our Lord Himself who tells us that 

Paradise is not Heaven. For even after He 

Paradise is re ^ urne ^ from Paradise He said to 

not Heaven. ' Mary Magdalen> « \ am not yet 

ascended to My Father ; but go to My brethren 
and say unto them, I ascend unto My Father 
and your Father; and to My God and your 
God" (S. John xx. 17). It was only on the 
Ascension Day, forty days after His resurrec- 
tion and His return from Paradise, that the 
Eternal Son of God, who had become Man for 
us men, attained as Man that crowning joy for 
Himself and us. Only then did He enter as 
Man on that new work, that new ministry, for 
our perfection of which He spoke when He 
said, " I go to prepare a place for you. And 
if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come 
again and receive you unto Myself ; that where 
I am there ye may be also." 

Let us ask then what may be the nature of 
that home which, ever since the day of His 



HEAVEN. jj 

ascension from Olivet, Jesus Christ our Brother 
Man has been thus preparing for our final rest 
and joy. Christians have sometimes been 
charged with what is called " other-worldli- 
ness," that is, with dwelling more on the thought 
of Heaven than on the plain duties that face 
them here on earth. I have no doubt that now 
and then there has been good ground for such 
a charge. Nevertheless I am sure that no one 
knows more fully than the earnest Christian how 
real, how pressing, is the work and struggle of 
the life here and now. And for one who knows 
how transient are all the things of this present 
world, Christ's revelation of a future world can 
never be a subject of mere theoretical or senti- 
mental interest. If details are omitted, the out- 
lines and colouring of the picture are too strongly 
laid in Holy Scripture to admit of any doubt 
as to its practical purpose for every Chris- 
tian. 

Observe then, first of all, how our Lord 
speaks of Heaven as " a place," and not merely 
a state. " I go to prepare a place for Heaven ,. a 
you." It is one of the very founda- place " 
tion stones of the Christian faith, it is in fact 
that which distinguishes it absolutely from all 
earthborn religions and philosophies, that our 
life in the world to come is not to be that of 



78 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

mere bodiless ghosts. As we are men here, and 
not angels, so shall we be men there, perfect in 
all things pertaining to man's nature, even as 
Christ the Eternal Man : " Our body fashioned 
like unto His glorious Body "(Phil. iii. 21). 
Our manhood is not a thing to be for ever cast 
aside at death. Little as we may now under- 
stand the value and necessity of that marvellous 
instrument which we call our body, the fact is 
fully revealed to us, and modern science is 
giving it strong confirmation, that without a 
body there is no perfection for men. And so, 
this fundamental fact of Christianity alone 
makes necessary the truth which our Lord de- 
clares when He says, " I go to prepare a place 
for you.'* 

But what is the character of this place? 
There are two ways in which Holy Scripture 
represents Heaven to our thought. 

1. First, it gives us symbolic pictures of 
Heaven. We know how the last two chapters 
Heaven re- °f tne New Testament are filled with 
S e " this one thought. They form as it 

were the great east window of a grand cathe- 
dral, beyond which we can see no visible form, 
but in which we see many symbols lighted with 
all the brilliant hues of the Heaven that is itself 
unseen. 



HEAVEN. 



79 



In their natural sense these images of Heaven 
are incompatible with each other, but this is 
plainly because they are only symbols. At one 
time S. John sees Heaven as a glorious city. It 
possesses " the glory of God," he writes, " and 
her light is like unto a stone most precious, even 
like a jasper stone, clear as crystal." It has a 
wall great and high, and has twelve gates, and 
at the gates twelve angels. And the building 
of the wall is of jasper, and the city is of pure 
gold, like unto clear glass, and the foundations 
of the wall are garnished with all manner of 
precious stones. And the twelve gates are 
twelve pearls, and the street of the city is pure 
gold. And there is no night there, and no need 
of the sun or moon, for the glory of God doth 
lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof 
(Rev. xxi.). 

Again, Heaven is a new world, wherein is 
" no more sea " with its restlessness and its 
separation. Again, it is a mountain-top with 
innumerable worshippers before a throne. It is 
a great marriage feast, and it is an open country, 
with trees, and fadeless flowers, and running 
streams. 

There is indeed no detail given us, such as 
impostors and religious romancers from Mo- 
hammed on to Swedenborg have invented since. 



80 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE, 

There is no vulgarizing of Heaven by the at- 
tempted transference of worldly ideals to what 
in that case would only prove another, though 
a somewhat higher, earth. There is in these 
pictures only a "mirror," as S. Paul calls it (i 
Cor. xiii. 12), with its mystery, and its brilliant 
colouring, and its symbolic signs, through 
which we now see " darkly," he adds, " until the 
day break, and the shadows flee away," and we 
" see face to face." 

2. But the appeal to our sense of mystery and 

our imagination does not stand alone in this 

The appeal vision of Heaven. Holy Scripture 

to our experi- 
ence. nas other methods addressed to our 

actual experience and our conscious needs. 
Yet here again we meet with the same marked 
reserve as before in its revelation of Paradise. 
Scripture does not tell us so much of the pres- 
ence of joys in Heaven as of the absence of 
sorrows. Its descriptions are rather negations 
than affirmations. There will be no sick-beds 
there, no anxious watching for the change that 
never comes on the face of some loved sufferer. 
There will be no heartaches over some way- 
ward child, no estrangements, no ignorance of 
each other, no slander, no hatred. " And sor- 
row and sighing shall flee away." 

But we must not forget that there is a posi- 



HEAVEN. 8 1 

tive as well as a negative side in Scripture's 
revelation of Heaven as of Paradise. It is a 
side which is not always realized as it deserves, 
even by Christian minds. Eternal rest, we may 
be sure, does not mean eternal idleness. Mod- 
ern science tells us that all life is a form of 
motion. Heaven without occupation, no less 
than earth without occupation, would be a place 
of perpetual silence and of death. We must 
not miss the fact that Heaven, as it is revealed 
in Scripture, is one vast field of ordered activ- 
ity, intense, joyous activity. " Thy will be 
done on earth," we say, " as it is done in 
Heaven." And it is written of those who 
" have washed their robes, and made them 
white in the blood of the Lamb," that they 
"serve Him day and night in His temple" 
(Rev. vii. 15). 

In Heaven God's will is done perfectly by the 
holy angels, by some in adoration of His per- 
fections, by some in ministries of active service 
to each other and to men. Each has his own 
special place and work for which God has fitted 
him. Seraphim, cherubim, powers, virtues, 
dominions, thrones, principalities, angels and 
archangels (Eph. i, 21; Col. i. 16), these are 
some of those glorious orders of celestial beings 
who are God's appointed agents for the govern- 



82 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

ment of the universe, and by means of whom 
much of what we call the natural, as well as 
what we call the supernatural affairs of the 
world are controlled continually. " He maketh 
His angels spirits, and His ministers a flaming 
fire," wrote the Psalmist (ciii. 4). And it was 
the conviction of one of the most profound as 
well as most spiritual intellects of our day that 
" every breath of air, and ray of light and heat, 
every beautiful prospect, is, as it were, the 
skirts of their garments, the waving of the robes 
of those whose faces see God in Heaven." * In- 
deed Scripture and our Lord Himself are our 
witnesses that the chief instruments of His 
Father's will in the material as well as the 
spiritual world are not dead impersonal laws, 
but living, personal, and perfectly obedient 
spirits. 

" And I put it to any one," Newman adds, 
" whether it is not as philosophical, and as full 
of intellectual enjoyment, to refer the move- 
ments of the natural world to angels, as to 
attempt to explain them by certain theories of 
science; useful as these theories certainly are 
for particular purposes, and capable (in sub- 
ordination to that higher view) of a religious 

* John Henry Newman on " The Powers of Nature," in vol, 
ii. of " Parochial and Plain Sermons." 



HEAVEN. 83 

application." And then, after quoting the many 
instances in Holy Scripture where effects in the 
material world are attributed to the direct in- 
strumentality of angels (Gen. xix. 13; Ex. xix. 
16-18; 2 Sam. xxiv. 15-17; 2 Kings xix. 35; S. 
Matt, xxviii. 2; S. John v. 4; Acts vii. 53; Gal. 
iii. 19; Rev. vii., viii., ix., xvi.), the author of this 
remarkable sermon goes on to say: — " Nature 
is not inanimate; its daily toil is intelligent; its 
works are duties. Accordingly the Psalmist 
says, ' The heavens declare the glory of God, 
and the firmament showeth His handy-work.' 
i Thou hast laid the foundation of the earth and 
it abideth. They continue this day according 
to Thine ordinance, for all things serve Thee' 
(Ps. xix. 1 ; cxix. 90, 91). And what is true of 
the terrible, is true on the other hand of the 
pleasant and attractive operations of Nature. 
When then, we walk abroad and ' meditate in the 
field at the eventide,' how much has every herb 
and flower in it to surprise and overwhelm us! 
For even did we know as much about them as 
the wisest of men, yet there are those around 
us, though unseen, to whom our greatest 
knowledge is as ignorance " (pp. 360, 362, 364, 

365). 

And as these holy angels are, in wisdom and 
in power, so shall risen and glorified men be- 



84 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

come. Not bodiless, indeed, like angels, but, 
as our Lord expresses it, " equal unto the angels," 
that is, sharers in their powers and work, ham- 
pered no longer by the limitations and weak- 
nesses of a mortal body, but possessing now 
that still more glorious nature of the ascended 
Son of Man, which angels gaze upon with won- 
dering and adoring love. " Sown in weakness; 
raised in power; sown a natural body; raised a 
spiritual body " (i Cor. xv. 43, 44). 

What scope and encouragement are here to 
the man of great intellect, or intense energy, or 
commanding influence in the ordering of earthly 
things. For these, also, let us remember are 
gifts of God, and provided they are coupled 
with the great cardinal virtues of faith and 
hope and love, they will by no means cease at 
death, but only attain their perfect development 
and infinitely wider use in the world to come. 
For life beyond the grave, as Bishop Butler 
puts it, does not "begin anew," but simply 
"goes on." 

" Some modern sceptics," writes Mr. Baring- 
Gould, " have shuddered at the prospect of 
that eternity to which a Christian clings, 
because they misunderstand it. The future 
life is differently viewed by every one, and 
will, according to the Catholic theory, be 



HEAVEN. 85 

different to every one. It will be the ideal of 
every one; if his idea of happiness be low, his 
future will be of small value ; if high, it will be 
glorious. Each will have his capacity of enjoy- 
ment satisfied, but the capacity of one being 
greater than that of another, the amount of de- 
light to one will be greater than to another. 
Just, says an old writer, as at the feast in 
Shushan the palace, * they gave them drink in 
vessels of gold (the vessels being diverse one 
from another), and royal wine in abundance ' 
(Esther i. 7), so will it be hereafter; every man 
will be satisfied, but the measure of one will not 
be the measure of another. This is what some 
have failed to understand. The future life has 
been conceived as a dead level of insufferable 
monotony, so dreary that men — 

' Would fain lie down and die, 

But for their curse of immortality.' 

"But this is false altogether to the hypothe- 
sis of the Incarnation, which requires that the 
wants of man will find their complete satisfac- 
tion in Christ. If his ideal of happiness be per- 
petual activity, such he will find to be his 
heaven. 

' some work sublime for ever working 

In the spacious tracts of that great land.' " * 
* Origin and Development of Religious Belief, Part II. 



86 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

3. And there is one joy that must exceed 

all else in any rational estimate of what 

_ . . Heaven shall be to men. Itistheioy 

The joy of J J 

ail joys. that will come when each Christian 

man and woman and child is admitted to the 
visible presence of Jesus Christ. All other joys 
must pale in view of that. To see Him who 
made the worlds, and yet was born for us in 
Bethlehem; Him who spake such words, and 
wrought such deeds, and was crucified for us, 
and rose again, and now rules Heaven and 
earth — all this is so wonderful that we almost 
fear to think of it lest it should be too good to 
be true. And yet it is the most unvarnished of 
revealed facts, the baldest, most literal of truths, 
the practical neglect of which deprives us of 
one of the mightiest powers in the battle of the 
Christian life, namely, the joy of hope. As this 
same "joy set before Him" enabled our Lord 
to bear the burden of life's sorrows, so also can 
it do, and so should it do, for us. 

Observe how clearly our Lord Himself put 
this great motive before us. " I will come 
again," He says, "and receive you," not merely 
into Heaven, but " unto Myself, that where I 
am, there ye may be also." " To be with Christ, 
which is far better," is S. Paul's chief thought 
of Paradise. And to behold Him — our own flesh 



HEA VEN. 87 

and blood, remember — in the Beatific Vision of 
the Godhead, and to be with Him for ever in 
His perfect kingdom in Heaven, that must be 
"far better" still. To see Him as the disciples 
saw Him on the Mount of Transfiguration, to 
possess His love and His visible Presence for 
ever — that must be joy and gladness which all 
words of men or angels are helpless to express. 
For " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
have entered into the heart of man, the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love 
Him" (1 Cor. ii. 9). 

4. There is but one other thought that I would 
present in conclusion. Let us not forget that 
while Heaven is a place, and Christ 
our Lord is no mere divine influence, **veniymind. 
but eternally our glorified brother Man, yet it 
must also be said that there can be no Heaven 
for any man except there be the heavenly mind. 
Heaven must begin on this earth if it is to begin 
at all. " Thy will be done on earth," we pray. 
That heavenly mind which, as S. Paul says, is 
" the earnest," orforetaste, " of our inheritance," 
must come first. 

And the chief element, the essential element, 
in that heavenly mind is love, sincere love of 
God and love of men. It is not an intellectual 
quality, but a spiritual one. It is not clever- 



88 SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

ness, or genius, or the gifts that make men suc- 
cessful in this world. It may be the possession 
of the lowliest and most ignorant, just as much 
as of the most learned and most powerful. 

That is the great spiritual message of S. John, 
as well as of S. Paul, concerning what consti- 
tutes Christian character. " He that loveth 
not," S. John writes, " knoweth not God, for God 
is love " (i John iv. 8). Without love there can 
be neither the knowledge of God, nor fitness 
for that Heaven which Christ is now preparing 
for men. If we have no love for Christ, and 
for those whom He loves, need we wonder if 
Heaven is a most unreal place to us, an unsub- 
stantial dream? If we never think in a practi- 
cal, serious way of the King of Heaven, if we 
never now come into His very presence in 
prayer and sacrament, what can Heaven be to 
us but the most shadowy of phantoms, the most 
unwelcome of future homes? 

Yet how clear and unmistakable is Christ's 
own description of Heaven. "That where I 
am, there ye may be also." That is Heaven, 
and nothing else can be Heaven. It follows 
that to have "the mind of Christ," His heart, 
His thought, to love Him and the things which 
He loves, can be our only possible fitness for 
His presence hereafter. It can be our only fit- 



HEAVEN. 89 

ness for those "good things which pass man's 
understanding," which Christ is now preparing 
for all who unfeignedly love Him, for all who 
are striving, though with many a failure, to 
do His will on earth as it is done in Heaven. 
Here is the final purpose of all our discipline 
in the school of this sinful and troubled world, 
and of that higher school of Paradise, the sum- 
mer land of the soul for growth in truth and 
love; "the mind of Christ," "the measure of 
the stature of the fulness of Christ." 

"This earth is beautiful; o'er land and sea 

The mighty shadow of God's thought is cast, 
But brighter far the Home that is to be. 
O Christ! receive us to that Home at last." 



IN EXCELSIS. 

Down below, the wild November whistling 
Through the beech's dome of burning red, 

And the Autumn sprinkling penitential 
Dust and ashes on the chestnut's head. 

Down below, a pall of airy purple, 

Darkly hanging from the mountain's side, 

And the sunset from his eyebrow staring 
O'er the long roll of the leaden tide. 

Up above, the tree with leaf unfading, 

By the everlasting river's brink, 
And the sea of glass beyond whose margin 

Never yet the sun was known to sink. 

Down below, the white wings of the sea-bird 
Dashed across the furrows dark with mould, 

Flitting, like the memories of our childhood, 
Through the trees now waxen pale and old. 

Down below, imaginations quivering 

Through our human spirits like the wind, 

Thoughts that toss like leaves upon the woodland, 
Hopes like sea-birds flashed across the mind. 



IN EXCELSIS. 

Up above, the host no man can number, 
In white robes, a palm in every hand, 

Each some work sublime for ever working, 
In the spacious tracts of that great land. 

Up above, the thoughts that know not anguish, 
Tender care, sweet love for us below, 

Noble pity, free from anxious terror, 
Larger love without a touch of woe. 

Down below, a sad, mysterious music, 

Wailing through the woods and on the shore, 

Burdened with a grand majestic secret, 
That keeps sweeping from us evermore. 

Up above, the music that entwineth 
With eternal threads of golden sound, 

The great poem of this strange existence, 

All whose wondrous meaning hath been found. 

Down below, the Church, to whose poor window 
Glory by the autumnal trees is lent, 

And a knot of worshippers in mourning, 
Missing some one at the Sacrament. 

Up above, the bu^t of hallelujah, 
And (without the sacramental mist 

Wrapt around us like a sunlit halo) 
One great vision of the face of Christ. 

Down below, cold sunshine on the tombstone, 
And the green wet turf with faded flowers, 

Winter roses, once like young hopes burning, 
Now beneath the ivy dript with showers: 



91 



9 2 



SOME PURPOSES OF PARADISE. 

And the new-made grave within the churchyard, 
And the white cap on that young face pale, 

And the watcher ever as it dusketh 
Rocking to and fro with that long wail. 

Up above, a crowned and happy spirit, 

Like an infant in the eternal years, 
Who shall grow in love and light for ever, 

Ordered in his place among his peers. 

O the sobbing of the winds of Autumn, 

O the sunset streak of stormy gold, 
O the poor heart thinking in the churchyard, 

"Night is coming, and the grave is cold." 

O the pale and plashed and sodden roses, 
O the desolate heart that grave above, 

O the white cap shaking as it darkens 
Round that shrine of memory and love. 

O the rest for ever, and the rapture! 

O the hand that wipes the tears away! 
O the golden homes beyond the sunset, 
And the hope that watches o'er the clay! 
— The Most Rev. William Alexander, D.D., 
D.C.L., Archbishop of Armagh. 



NDEX 



Alexander, Bishop, 40, 43 
Alford, Dean, 68 
American Puritanism, 14 
Andrewes, Bishop, 70 
Angels, 17, 24, 25, 55 
Apostles in Paradise, 58 
Apennines, 46 
Armitage, Bishop, 60 
Article XXII. , 45 
Athanasian Creed, 35 
Atheists, 34 
Augustine, S., 49, 56 

B 

Bampton Lectures, 40, 47 

Bargello, 33 

Baxter, Richard, 70 

Beatific Vision, 19, 38, 39, 44 

Bellett, 35 

Bengel, 68 

Bianchi, 33 

Body, 17, 18, 57, 63 

Boone, Bishop, 60 

Bridegroom, 26 

Brown, Bishop J. H. H. , 60 

Buddhism, 47 

Bunyan, 12 

Burgon, Dean, 59 



Burial Office, 70, 72, 73, 74 
Butler, Archer, 24 
Butler, Bishop, 23 



Calvinism, 9 

Canute, 44 

Carpenter, Bishop, 47 

Catholic Faith, 35 

Channing, 61 

Christ in Paradise, 31, 32, 43, 

44, 57» 6o 
Church, Dean, 48 
Church of England, 69, 70, 71 
Church Quarterly Review, 33, 

46 
Church, The, 17, 32, 33, 39, 40, 

53, 54 
Clement of Alexandria, 58 
"Conditional Immortality," 1 1 
Contemporary Review, 61 
Convocation, 69 
Cosin, Bishop, 70 
Cyril, S., 51, 52, 59 



Daniel, 55 

Dante, 12, 33, 45, 46, 48 

David, 29 



9 6 



INDEX. 



Davidson, J. P. F., 51 
Day of Judgment, 27 
Dead, Preaching to the, 58 
Death, 8, 14, 26, 27 
De Koven, Dr. J., 60 
Delitzsch, 10 
Derry, Bishop of, 43 
De Wette, 68 

Development, 23, 24, 25, 26 
Divine Comedy, 12, 45, 46, 48 
Dix, Dr. Morgan, 49 
Dorner, 10 
Dorr, Julia, 66 

E 
Eden, 48 
Egypt, 45 
Elijah, 32 
Ellicott, Bishop, 68 
Elliott, Bishop R. W. B., 60 
Eternal Time, 24, 25 



Farrar, Canon, 9 
Final Punishment, II 
Florence, 33 



"Gates of Hell," 53 

Gehenna, 53 

Gentiles, 34 

Gerontius, Dream of, 25, 43 

Giotto, 33 

Greeks, 21 

Gregory Nazianzen, S., 42 

H 

Hades, 14, 53, 54, 57 
Hannington, Bishop, 60 



Hardwick, Archdeacon, 69 
Harris, Bishop S. S., 60 
Heaven, 13, 14, 15, 19, 29, 32, 

38, 39, 48, 52, 63 
Heber, Bishop, 70 
Hebrews, 21 
Hell, 13, 14, 33, 48, 57 
Heracleitus, 34 
Hermas, 58 
Holy Scripture, 13, 14, 15, 16, 

30. 33 
Hooker, 41 



Imaginations of Heaven, Chris- 
tian, 33> 46 

Inferno, 33 

Intermediate State, 13, 14, 16, 
18, 40 

Italy, 46 



James, Liturgy of S., 71 
Judgment, General, 16, 26, 28, 

37 
Justin Martyr, 33 



Keats, 49 

Keble, 60 

Ken, Bishop, 70 

Knowledge in Paradise, 30-35 



" Labours," 49, 50 
Last Day, 17 
Lee, Dr. F. G., 71, 72 
Liddon, Canon, 7, 51 
Littledale, Dr., 71 



INDEX. 



97 



Liturgies, 20, 69, 71 

Longfellow, 12, 46 

Lowell, 61 

Luckock, Canon, 9, 38, 41, 42, 

61 
Lutheran, 41 

M 

Maccabseus, Judas, 67 
Mann, Rev. C, 18 
"Mansions," 28, 35, 57, 64, 

73 
Marriage Feast, 26 
Martensen, 10, 42 
Martyrs, 16, 28, 29 
Maskell, 73 
Maurice, F. D., 59, 61 
Milton, 12 

Ministries in Paradise, 55, 56 
Moses, 32 
Mtiller, 10 

N 

Neale, Dr. J. M., 71 
New England, 13 
Newman, 10, 25, 43 
Neri, 33 
Nirwana, 47 



Onesiphorus, 27, 68 
Overall, Bishop, 70 
Oxenham, H. N., 10 



Pagan, 7, 33 

Pain in Purification, 41, 43, 44 



Paradise, 13, 14, 15, 19-23, 26, 

28 > 3*> 33> 3S» 40, 43> 47. 49» 

51-65, 71, 73 
Parliament, 69 
Pascal, 47 

Patteson, Bishop, 60 
Persians, 21 
Plumptre, Dean, 9, 59, 61, 68, 

69. 73 
Pounds, 26 
Prayer Book, First Reformed, 

69> 73 
Prayer for the Departed, 62, 67- 

75 
Primitive Church, 15 
Probation, Second, 16, 17, 18 
Purgatorio, 45, 46 
Purgatory, 42, 43, 45, 46, 71 
Purification, 37, 41, 42, 43 
Puritanism, 9, 12, 13, 14 
Pusey, Dr., 9, 34, 39, 44, 51 
Pusey, Philip, 51, 52 



R 



Rest, 20, 21, 22 

Resurrection, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 

31, 37, 63 
Revised Version, 50, 54 
Rome, 13, 29, 41, 46, 71 



Sabaoth, 56 
Sabbath, 21 

Scotch Presbyterian, 64 
Septuagint, 53 
Shepherd, The, 59 
Sleep of Body, 47 
Smith, Walter C, 65 
Socrates, 34 
Spirit, 48 



9 8 



INDEX. 



Spiritualism, 9 
Stael, Madame de, 47 
Stephen, S., 59 
Stier, 10 
Strotnata, 58 
Swedenborgianism, 9 



Talents, 26 

Tartarus, 53 

Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 68, 

Thayer, 28 

Time, 24, 25 

Tradition, 17 

Transfiguration, 32 

U 
Ussher, Archbishop, 70 



70 



Virgins, Ten, 26 

"Voice from Heaven," 49, 50 

Vulgate, 35 

W 

Wesley, John, 70 
Westcott, Bishop, 35 
Westminster Confession, 14 
Wheatfield, 26 
"Word, The," 33, 34 
"Works," 49, 50 
Worship in Paradise, 51 



Xenophon, 21. 



J W 12 19Q8 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: August 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



fir 



